It's never a good time to be laid off. Losing your job with a newborn can be especially hard.

Jess Mayhugh got the call from HR while sitting on her couch at home with her newborn son nearby. Just six weeks postpartum and on the early side of her four months of planned maternity leave, the Baltimore-based media professional says she learned her role was being eliminated in the latest round of layoffs at her company.

"I remember looking over at my son and just having this pang of guilt [thinking]: I'm not going to know if I can take care of him," Mayhugh, 40, tells CNBC Make It.

It's hard to say just how common it is for women to be laid off while on maternity leave with a newborn, but a few indicators signal it's a persistent issue, says Katherine Gallagher Robbins, senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women and Families, a nonpartisan nonprofit. There are documented instances of people laid off while on leave, lawsuits about people's leave being used against them in firing decisions, and research showing employers discriminate against mothers in their hiring decisions — "discrimination which could plausibly extend to their termination decisions, too," Gallagher Robbins says.

Recent data shows women are bearing the brunt of job losses. Some 845,000 women have left the workforce since the beginning of the year, more than double the amount of men, according to a National Women's Law Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Women, particularly women of color, are occupationally segregated into jobs seeing big cuts, including in the leisure and hospitality sector, in public service, and among jobs related to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, says Janelle Jones, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.

It's an increasingly risky time to lose your job. Living costs are high and hiring is weak while roughly 1 in 4 unemployed job seekers spends six months or more looking for work.

For women in the vulnerable position of leaving work to birth and care for a newborn, the possibility of losing their job during that time can feel like an ever-looming threat.

"What we're seeing is a labor market that is incredibly hostile to women, and an administration that is also making it harder for women," Jones says, referring to the administration's work to roll back public safety nets like food stamps and affordable health coverage. "There's no surprise that women are coming up against these kinds of [challenges] in the workplace."

Leave protections are limited and confusing

In the days and weeks that followed her layoff, Mayhugh says one big question arose anytime she brought up the issue with family and friends.

"The first reaction most people give me when I have told them is, 'Isn't that illegal?'" she says. "Those are the most three common words that people have met me with, and I said, 'Unfortunately, it's not.' But it sounds like one of those things that should be."

Jess Mayhugh was laid off from her media job in January shortly after giving birth to her son.

Rachel Parker

U.S. laws do exist to protect workers from being discriminated against for taking leave or other accommodations related to pregnancy or caring for a newborn. The most well-known is probably the Family and Medical Leave Act, or FMLA, which prohibits discrimination, including retaliation or termination, against workers who take up to 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave.

But there are gaps: FMLA only protects full-time workers at employers with 50 or more employees.

A few complementary laws address these gaps: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act federally protects full- and part-time employees from discrimination on the basis of pregnancy or related medical conditions and applies to employers with 15 or more workers. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which took effect in 2023, protects workers from retaliation for requesting or using accommodations while pregnant.

Many states and cities have more expansive protections that go beyond federal protections.

But these policies don't protect people from a layoff due to other factors like if the company downsizes or closes operations.

I feel like layoffs since the pandemic have just become ingrained in the public consciousness.

Ruika Lin

former tech worker in the Bay Area

Now, AI is entering the mix as more businesses cite investing in the tech as a reason to cut their workforce.

"We see that employers continue to search for neutral-sounding justifications for making what are otherwise discriminatory job decisions," says Laura Narefsky, senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center. "There is simply not enough understanding right now of how AI really is changing and shaping the workforce to be able to parse that kind of a high-level justification."

Layoff anxiety runs high in a brutal job market

Economists say we're in a low hire, low fire job market. That's not keeping layoff anxiety at bay.

Ruika Lin spent about 10 years in tech before she learned of her layoff, along with several other colleagues, halfway through her four-month maternity leave in 2023. She noticed layoffs began picking up in her field around 2022 and says announced cuts now feel "nonstop."

"I feel like layoffs since the pandemic have just become ingrained in the public consciousness" and are today considered the "norm," says Lin, 37, of the Bay Area, now a real estate investor and creative writer. "It's just like, 'Oh, there's been another layoff, another layoff" and so on.

Current layoffs hover near pre-pandemic levels but are higher in some fields, including media and technology jobs, while small layoffs of less than 50 people make up a growing share of job cuts, according to Glassdoor research, contributing to what it calls a trend of continual "forever layoffs."

And many workers are still reeling from federal workforce cuts related to the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency efforts.

Casey Horvitz, 40, worked for a nonprofit doing public health research and went on maternity leave in January 2025. Horvitz says she took 12 weeks of unpaid leave through FMLA, returned to work on a Monday, and on Tuesday got an email saying she'd been selected for her department's latest round of cuts.

"It was really devastating and really heartbreaking," says Horvitz of Durham, North Carolina, adding that the timing was "brutal."

Horvitz says she immediately launched herself into a job search. But this layoff felt different: As a public health worker, "it's not like I could just pivot to a competitor, because my entire field was being torn apart and losing the same funding," she says.

The second Trump administration's cuts to federal health agencies have included eliminating 20,000 jobs from the Department of Health and Human Services, canceling around $12 billion in Covid-era federal grants, and halting 22 projects worth nearly $500 million intended to develop countermeasures for public health emergencies, TIME reports.

Our health and well-being is tied to labor and economy.

Elizabeth Dawes

director of maternal health, The Century Foundation

Horvitz landed a new job in September 2025 outside of the public health field but hopes to one day rejoin the public service career sector. "I know that the job that I had doesn't really exist anymore," she says.

Mayhugh in Baltimore says her job search, now in its seventh month, has been slow-going. "This has by far been the most difficult and challenging job market I've seen in my life," she says, including the Great Recession labor market in 2008.

She says it's especially tough to find a job that has the flexibility, like remote days, that she'd find useful as a new mom. Sometimes she feels her level of experience as a manager doesn't make it any easier. "It feels like such a blow to women of a certain age who are at this level of their career," Mayhugh says. "It's harder to hire someone who's made it to a certain salary level or a certain leadership level."

A layoff leaves new parents in a bind for healthcare

One of the first things Meg Scheding of Los Angeles did when she was laid off three months into her mat leave in 2018 was to call her friend, an employment lawyer. Scheding, now 45, learned not to sign any severance agreement paperwork until she negotiated for better terms leaving her product marketing job. In doing so, she says she negotiated her three months of severance pay up to nine.

Other things you can negotiate include vacation time payout, a company-issued laptop or cellphone, or even staying on payroll, even at a salary of $1, to keep your health insurance for longer, according to New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber.

Loss of income is one stressor of being laid off, but just as pressing is figuring out healthcare coverage, a necessity for women at this point of postpartum as well as for their newborns.

In the U.S. 60% of people under age 65, or nearly 166 million people, had employer-sponsored health insurance in 2025, according to data from KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group. Some 1 in 4 even say they stay at a job they don't like just to maintain their health coverage.

The current system means "our health and well-being is tied to labor and economy," says Elizabeth Dawes, director of maternal health at The Century Foundation.

Mayhugh says she got four months of health insurance coverage in her severance agreement and negotiated for an additional three months through COBRA, or the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which allows people to temporarily keep their employer-sponsored health coverage if they lose their job.

Lin, in the Bay Area, says her family switched to her husband's employer-sponsored health coverage after her layoff, which triggered a special enrollment period that typically lasts from 30 to 60 days following a qualifying life event such as job loss. She also says she negotiated in her severance to receive the cash equivalent for what her employer would have offered for two months of medical, dental, and vision coverage for the whole family, including her newborn son.

Other people who lose their insurance may opt to enroll for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, or see if an income drop qualifies their family for Medicaid or Children's Health Insurance Program coverage.

Dealing with the aftermath

If you feel like discrimination might have played a role in your layoff while on maternity leave, documentation can mean everything if you decide to take up a case with your employer, says Narefsky of the NWLC. It begins before taking your leave, she advises: Keep track of conversations around your expected due date, your understanding of your company's leave policy, how much time you expect to take off and your intended return date.

It can also be helpful to keep record of your performance reviews. Narefsky says sometimes claimants with a stellar track record will suddenly get "really negative performance reviews out of the blue after they've told their employer they're pregnant."

If you're interested in talking to a lawyer, "reach out sooner rather than later," Narefsky says. In some states, workers have as short as 180 days to raise a claim or start an investigation, which can be a tight timeline for someone who has a newborn. She recommends referring to the Times Up Legal Defense Fund and the Legal Network for Gender Equity at the NWLC for help.

It's worth noting that losing a job while on leave isn't an issue that affects just new moms, Narefsky adds. "Too often, we see dads or non-birthing parents facing discrimination or stereotyping because of their desire to take leave," she says. "It's different, it's layered, but it's not just an issue that affects women."