One week into her third year at the University of North Carolina School of Law, Bree Koegel gave birth to her second child. Despite having plans about she would navigate her final year of law school with a newborn, she was met with institutional resistance. “It seemed as though the school forgot that they’re teaching us how to interpret the law,” Koegel says. “I thought, We’re going to use the law in our favor and get what we need—and more than that, not just what we need but what we’re entitled to.”
Federal laws like Title IX, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, and the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections (PUMP) for Nursing Mothers Act protect workers and students from discrimination from pregnancy, while also insisting on support and accommodations for lactating and pregnant individuals. Many state laws bolster and reinforce these protections. Yet, as Koegel and others find every day, many still face bias and discrimination.
In this story, we talk about parenting and pregnancy during law school. The ABA report on the Legal Careers of Parents and Child Caregivers paints a picture of the challenges associated with practicing law as a parent or caregiver. What about for those just starting out in the legal profession?
Learning and applying the law
Koegel’s journey to the legal profession was unconventional. She moved from North Carolina to New York City at age 18 to pursue professional dancing. However, a decade-long career on Broadway, in TV and film, and as a fitness instructor began to take a toll on her body. “In my early thirties, I thought, maybe I’ll just take a writing class, and it just snowballed from there,” she reflects. She pursued an undergraduate degree in government and, influenced by a class on higher education and public policy—subjects central to her mother’s career in the Office of Equal Opportunity at North Carolina State University—she decided to apply to law school.
Koegel had her first child during college—it was the summer of 2020, and all of her classes had already become virtual. She took the LSAT when her son was 7 weeks old and began law school at UNC with a one-year-old. Coming out of the depths of the pandemic made it easier, in some ways, as UNC was operating with a hybrid schedule.
During her second year of law school, she found out she was pregnant with her second child. With the administration’s support, she planned “to load up on summer school courses,” she says. This would allow her to dial back the credits once her baby was born—a “medical underload accommodation.” But when her child was born, she met with resistance. Koegel had a merit scholarship, and when she sought to take advantage of the medical underload accommodation, the Registrar and Financial Aid Office informed her she was underenrolled; it turns out such scholarships were available only to full-time tuition-paying students. “At two weeks postpartum, this was really not what I wanted to hear,” she says.
Koegel worked with the Office of Equal Opportunity—armed with knowledge from her classes and her mother’s know-how—to fight the administration. “Ultimately, they did make an exception for me, but it doesn’t really feel like a victory. What I wanted was for the policy to be changed,” she says. Koegel was allowed to keep her scholarship while taking advantage of the accommodation, but the policy still remains in place.
There are many, many ways where I felt quite supported, championed, and the school was proud of me, but at the same time, I also felt like it was an uphill battle that was meant for me to fail.
Bree Koegel, plaintiffs side employment lawyer
Once Koegel secured her scholarship, the lactation room became a battle. Private spaces for breastfeeding and pumping did exist, but coordinating the use between other students was complicated and not everyone respected the privacy and purpose of the room. Still, in that room, she met other student parents and formed an informal community; today, she is still in touch with many of those students, helping lobby for better lactation practices at the university. Koegel says she often thinks about non-breastfeeding student parents and how difficult it might be for them to find their own community. (UNC’s formal student parent group was seemingly inactive, and still, Koegel says, “Who has the time?”)
“There are many, many ways where I felt quite supported, championed, and the school was proud of me, but at the same time, I also felt like it was an uphill battle that was meant for me to fail,” she says. “Despite everything, I graduated on time with honors. But if you don’t have a personality type like mine, this can really tear you down at a time that should be [full of] some of your biggest brightest moments,” she says.
These challenges, of course, did not end at graduation. Koegel says. “Even taking the bar exam, trying to get breastfeeding accommodations was a mountain,” she explains. Four individuals were in the special accommodations room because they were breastfeeding, but they had only one lactation room, so the individuals had to take turns. “I thought, This is ridiculous. I can only go so many hours before I’m now in a medically compromised situation,” she says. What would she change? “It doesn’t take that much thought. It doesn’t take that much collaboration or reaching out to a medical professional to say, How can we be better in this area?”
Today, Koegel works as an plaintiffs side employment lawyer in an office she describes as “like a family.” Being a parent and doing law school at the same time has made Koegel “tougher,” she says. It’s prepared her well for her current role as a practicing lawyer. “Managing several fires at once is part of the [parenting] gig, and trying to do so in a way where you’re not losing yourself and losing your relationships is so important,” she says of lawyering and parenting at the same time. “It’s made me realize—and let go of—the things that are out of my control,” she says.
Comparative research
Other studies dive into the challenges of childbearing and parenting during other types of professional and graduate schooling. For instance, a number of studies examine the impact of having a child during medical education or medical training, which poses particular challenges due to the length and nature of clinical training. For instance, a 2024 article titled “The Double Whammy: Advanced Medical Training and Parenting” examined the high rates of burnout prevalent for medical professionals in training who are parents. Still, medical school and medical training may be categorized differently, as “Pregnancy and Parenting in Medical School: Highlighting the Need for Data and Support” points out, because residents—though still doctors in training—are protected by employment laws whereas students are not. According to 2020 data listed in the same article, “more than 7% of medical students graduate from medical school with at least 1 non-spouse dependent.”
A 2019 article, “Parenting on the Path to the Professoriate: A Focus on Graduate Student Mothers,” indicated that Ph.D.-earning mothers pursuing academic roles take longer to find tenure-track jobs and are more likely to take longer to finish their degrees. The self-directed nature of Ph.D.s means that childbearing during graduate school will play out differently than law school or medical school, where coursework and clinical hours are often mandatory throughout the entirety of the education.
Building a support group
Michelle Browning Coughlin always knew she wanted to one day attend law school. She also wanted to be a mother, and she didn’t yet know how those two dreams might be combined. It was the early 2000s, and she was working as a social worker running community programming at a hospital when the University of Louisville School of Law offered her a spot in their upcoming class. It was then that she also discovered she was pregnant. Coughlin remembers the dean saying to her, “I’m going to give you the option to start a year later, or you’re certainly welcome to come now. But if I were giving you advice as a person who’s had children, I would suggest you consider deferring.”
Coughlin deferred and began law school when her first child was 9 months old. She also attended at night, which gave her more flexibility. But she quickly found out that she still had to navigate lactation—at the time, the school had no policy that Coughlin was aware of and federal requirements to provide support to students were not strengthened until 2024 (more on this below).
Coughlin had her second child over winter break during her second year of law school. In the night division, there were others juggling work, parenting, and other activities, she says, but no one else was pregnant. “I was an enigma,” Coughlin says. Because her husband was a teacher, she was able to take advantage of summer internship opportunities, and in the semester immediately after her second child was born, she negotiated taking one fewer credit. However, she says, “It was not a policy. It was just an ad hoc accommodation.”
She describes the process of navigating law school, and then legal practice, while parenting as “running slowly into a brick wall.” Like many who excel and gain admission to law school, Coughlin was driven. She “didn’t see gender as a barrier or obstacle.” Her professional experiences caused her to think twice. “You lose your job on maternity leave, and you wonder, What happened? But you bounce back and start walking, and then you graduate law school and start working, and coworkers are making snide remarks about you having children while practicing law—you run into the wall a little bit again, but you get up again. Then colleagues begin insisting on inflexible schedules, and you run into it a little bit again.”
I say in my syllabus, if you have a childcare need, please let me know. I tell them, I had children in law school. I am happy to help accommodate.
Michelle Browning Coughlin, assistant professor, Northern Kentucky University Salmon P. Chase College of Law
During legal practice, looking for support and not finding it, Coughlin started her own advocacy group, MothersEsquire. She also became an member of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, helping to steward the latest report, Legal Careers of Parents and Child Caregivers. After navigating various practice scenarios as an IP lawyer—in a law firm, then in-house, then in a law firm again—Coughlin found a home as an assistant professor at Northern Kentucky University Salmon P. Chase College of Law. Now, as a professor, she’s responsible for helping students enter a profession that she feels has been less than welcoming to her. Still, she remains optimistic that culture change can happen as she brings her lived experiences into the classroom.
“I say in my syllabus, if you have a childcare need, please let me know. I tell them, I had children in law school. I am happy to help accommodate,” she says.
In turn, Coughlin has also been working with a student at the University of Louisville, Andi Dahmer, to craft better policies and practices to support pregnant and parenting law students. Dahmer, now a third-year law student, ran for the Student Bar Association with the goal of building a more supportive atmosphere for pregnant and parenting students.
“I do think it’s important to acknowledge that we are a law school in the South, and Dobbs has really changed a lot of aspects of life in Kentucky. Starting my 1L year, and really into 2L, so many women around me were grappling with whether or not to become parents,” Dahmer says. After seeing other students expand their families, Dahmer saw a need to identify “the policies we could implement or tweak at the law school and university to support them.” Working with a supportive administration and dean, Dahmer has been instrumental in suggesting modifications to their student handbook to specifically add information around Title IX as well as helping to transform two storage spaces into lactation rooms.
“In talking with [pregnant or parenting students] about whether or not they could withdraw from a class or take an incomplete, and then pursue that grade in the spring semester, or even defer or take time off or attend class virtually, it was clear that there really weren’t any hard-and-fast policies in place,” Dahmer says. In suggesting modifications to their student handbook, Dahmer has also seen how every parenting and pregnancy story is unique, so to provide resources where there may not be definite answers, she has also created a handout on “whom you should approach in our faculty and staff if you encounter any problems—everything from ‘you have experienced intimate partner violence’ to ‘you are unexpectedly having a child,’” she says. “I think it’s so much better when we can rely on an administration that we know will help rather than just an informal network,” she adds.
The changing landscape
Information for pregnant or parenting students can often be inaccessible or difficult to find for students at their own institutions. That’s where The Pregnant Scholar comes in. An initiative out of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco, the Pregnant Scholar seeks to demystify the rights of and resources available to pregnant and parenting students from secondary education to undergraduate to postgraduate.
“I think one of the biggest [challenges for pregnant and parenting students] is just knowing their options,” says Jessica Lee, codirector of the Center for WorkLife Law. As Lee explains, “Title IX has provided a right to time off from school and to accommodations and nondiscrimination for pregnant and postpartum students since the ’70s.” Until very recently, however, the text ensuring those rights was “so vague that schools just didn’t understand what they needed to do, and a lot of institutions didn’t quite get who was responsible for making sure it happened. So, whenever you have that sort of gray area, we see discretion and discrimination flourish.” In August 2024, the U.S. Department of Education unveiled new Title IX regulations clarifying specifically what rights and support institutions must give pregnant and parenting students. Despite injunctions challenging the new regulations in 26 states, Lee is urging institutions to adopt the regulations on pregnant and postpartum students into their policies. “I think that by really spelling it out, it’s a gift to institutions to no longer have to guess but rather to have some clear instructions,” she says. She explains:
Instead of just saying, “Schools need to provide an education without discrimination on the basis of sex, including pregnancy,” [the regulations] now say that and, “The way that you do it is by referring students to the Title IX coordinator, who must facilitate the provision of accommodations for pregnancy and related conditions,” and they list related conditions, [and what exactly the accommodations are, such as] “They need to provide lactation space for students.” And they describe what the space is going to look like. And finally there’s still that right to maternity leave for as long as medically necessary, with more guidance on who certifies medical necessity and the limitations on documentation requests.
The new Title IX regulations should help students understand their options by making clear who is in charge of supporting pregnant or parenting students and helping them navigate a time of transition. Law students, for instance, are regularly impacted by highly restrictive attendance policies. Lee has heard from deans who say, “We can’t let this student who’s in the hospital miss class because we don’t want to risk our accreditation.” But, says Lee, “when you push them on it, you realize that they have actually misinterpreted the ABA standards for attendance,” which, she says, “actually do give you some wiggle room to be able to both support the student in alignment with federal law and have rigorous attendance standards.”
One of the biggest [challenges for pregnant and parenting students] is just knowing their options.
Jessica Lee, Codirector, Center for WorkLife Law, University of California College of Law, San Francisco
Attendance policies are also an impediment to parents as their kids age. Lee points to examples where students are excused from class for extracurricular activities, but student parents are not when their child is sick. “Familial status is not a protected class in the federal education law, and we’ve really seen students suffer because of that,” Lee says.
As Coughlin points out, “You don’t always know at the beginning what accommodations you might need.” Having policies or point persons at universities can help.
“A lot of these policies stem from the old era of law schools where it was mostly men with wives at home to take care of their kids,” says Lee. “I think we need to start questioning that paradigm and looking at more flexible ways for folks to complete their studies, providing supports and accommodations along the way.”
