EXCLUSIVE: the wnba has a problem when it comes to the rights of postpartum athletes
“It's literally not in their best interest to treat pregnant people and people who carry children in the ways that they do.”
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The WNBA’s historic 2023 season, which saw 36 million people tune in—a 27% increase over the previous year—and the announcement of plans for league-expansion for the first time since 2008, was marred by another story that was much less celebratory. Athletes from two different franchises accused their teams of discriminating against them during or after their pregnancies, with Dearica Hamby claiming that the Las Vegas Aces traded her when they found out she was pregnant and Skylar Diggins-Smith saying that she was denied access to the Phoenix Mercury’s training facilities during her maternity leave.
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For a league that is often celebrated as the pinnacle of a women-led franchise, especially following the players’ groundbreaking 2020 collective bargaining agreement with maternity, childcare, and family planning benefits, it may seem surprising that pregnant and postpartum athletes are facing these sorts of challenges. But in many ways, ideas about if and how to support birthing athletes—especially at the elite level—are underexplored and under examined, thanks in large part to societal beliefs about women’s bodies.
But many WNBA players are saying the protections they’re currently offered are not enough, and new research seems to confirm that WNBA players have every right—both as people and as athletes—to demand better treatment from their employer. As a league that is predominantly Black, and in a world in which Black women face greater rates of post-pregnancy complications and maternal mortality, support for these athletes is of paramount importance.
“For elite athletes, the body is one and the same with their job,” says
, the author of Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes. “There’s this idea that the postpartum body is a liability, especially to an athlete’s career. The body goes through tremendous change—anatomically and physiologically—during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. It’s a big question mark for if and how the body would ‘bounce’ back.”Not only that, “there is a certain amount of bodily optimization built into most athletics,” says
, the author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control. “But also, the athlete's body becomes a public commodity—literally traded on the market.”Essentially, players are being viewed as less valuable—and therefore disposable—after getting pregnant and giving birth.
The 2020 CBA was historic, offering players maternity leave at full pay and guaranteed parents two-bedroom apartments and child-care subsidies, in addition to family planning benefits like egg freezing and IVF. But even at the time it was passed, the Women’s National Basketball Players’ Association (WNBPA), the union for the WNBA players, knew that it wasn’t a perfect deal by any means, and one of the places they knew it fell short was regarding protections for pregnant and postpartum players. However, it’s likely no one could have predicted just how quickly its deficits would impact athletes.
The WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces are as close to a superteam as a team in the most competitive pro sports league can be. Ahead of the 2022-2023 season, they announced they had hired former San Antonio Spurs coach—and WNBA legend—Becky Hammon away from the NBA in a bid to win the franchise’s first championship.
Led by two-time WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson, the team was nearly untouchable all season and beat the Connecticut Sun in the WNBA Finals to bring home the title. Hammon was named 2022 WNBA Coach of the Year. Ahead of the 2023 season, the team traded Hamby, one of their long-time core players, to the Los Angeles Sparks. Hamby, a two-time Sixth Woman of the Year with the Aces, was pregnant with her second child at the time and said she’d had a “traumatizing” experience with the franchise.
Hamby accused Hammon and the Aces of “bull[ying], manipulat[ing], and discriminat[ing] against” her after finding out she was pregnant. Following an investigation by the league, Hammon was suspended for the first two games of the 2023 season and the Aces lost their first-round 2025 draft pick (Hamby has filed a discrimination suit against both the Aces and the WNBA with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and that case is ongoing).
Hammon addressed the allegations shortly after the league announced the sanctions. “I don't recall my relationship with Hamby being anything but on the up-and-up, and I'm just -- obviously along with the organization -- disappointed with the findings,” Hammon said in a video call in May 2023. "It's never [good] to have your name be associated with something like that, which is not who you are as a person. That's not how I operate.”
A new documentary that began streaming on YouTube ahead of this season, The Aces vs Everybody, addresses the impact of Hammon’s suspension on the team, who was hoping to win back-to-back championships (spoiler: they do). In Hamby’s legal complaint, she claims her former teammates cut off all communication with her after she spoke up publicly about her experiences with Hammon. While the players avoid addressing Hamby by name in the film, lip service is given to what a difficult experience the allegations—and resulting suspension—are for both the 2023 Aces and Hammon herself. No empathy is extended, at least on-screen, to what Hamby may have gone through, which is a jarring watch when you know that Hamby was a key piece to the Aces’ success for eight seasons (including three seasons when the franchise was still in San Antonio before it moved to Las Vegas in 2018). It really underscores how isolated and disposable she must have felt to a franchise that she had given so much of herself to.
“We’ve never really set up women athletes to succeed in the postpartum period,” says Yu. “There hasn’t always been the support—financial, physical, mental—for women to return to high level of sport after having a baby. There’s a dearth of research on pregnant and postpartum athletes and return-to-sport guidelines, particularly for elite athletes, are non-existent. Athletes are often left to wing it while dealing with tremendous pressure to return to the top of their sport as quickly as possible.”
Diggins-Smith’s experience highlights this reality. She gave birth to her second child in the spring of 2023. In August, she took to social media to accuse the Mercury of essentially locking her out of their facilities. “I can't even use the practice facility or any resources,” she said. She clarified in followup posts that she has no access to "massage therapists, chiropractor, chefs, strength and conditioning, nutritionist accessibility, etc ... [that] EVERY other player has access to.”
Diggins-Smith was traded to the Seattle Storm ahead of the 2024 season, but the Mercury were actually the second franchise that Diggins-Smith had a negative experience with when it came to pregnancy-related support. Diggins-Smith played most of her 2018 season with the Dallas Wings while pregnant with her first child, claiming she “didn’t tell a soul” that she was expecting. She took 2019 off from playing basketball after giving birth in the offseason and struggling with postpartum depression. “With limited resources to help me be successful mentally/physically,” she posted on X in 2019. “Having no support from your own organization is unfortunate.” (Neither Hamby nor Diggins-Smith returned requests for comment.)
Diggins-Smith’s experience with the Wings was prior to the 2020 CBA being passed but her experience with the Mercury happened afterwards, when player protections were assumed to be stronger. The players have until November 1, 2024 to decide whether they will opt-out of the 2020 CBA—which was passed as an 8-year CBA—and negotiate a new one. If they choose not to opt out, stronger protections for working moms can't be negotiated until 2028. Several players have been vocal about wanting to opt-out, including league MVPs Breanna Stewart and Jonquel Jones. In the documentary Shattered Glass: An WNBPA Story (currently streaming on Tubi), Stewart cites the insufficient protections for birthing players as one of the reasons she wants out. The documentary was partially filmed following Hamby’s complaints against the Aces and Diggins-Smith’s complaints against the Mercury and while they are not directly addressed in the film, their presence looms large, particularly over one section where the PA discusses the need for increased protections for players who give birth.
The WNBPA did not return multiple requests for comment for this story. However, following Hamby’s discrimination lawsuit, they released a statement. “In the 2020 CBA, player parents gained protections that ensured becoming a parent did not mean the end of a career,” the statement read. “Obviously, these protections did not change the nature of this business. Any team can trade any player for any reason or no reason at all. But that reason cannot be on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, or pregnancy status alone.”1
It is clear that reproductive justice—which includes the full spectrum of reproductive experiences, from access to pregnancy prevention, pregnancy termination, family planning resources, maternity and postpartum protections, and childcare support—is a priority for the players of the WNBA. The WNPBA has explicitly come out in support of abortion access with a NARAL partnership following the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Ahead of the 2024 season, the league has announced a partnership with Opill, the first over-the-counter birth control pill, as part of the league’s season-long social justice campaign related to reproductive health advocacy.
It’s a smart PR move from the WNBA to focus on advocating for reproductive health following two high-profile player complaints related to the issue. If the campaign was player-led, could it have been a form of solidarity response to athletes watching their colleagues be treated unfairly? One WNBA player, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that the campaign wasn’t related to the recent pregnancy discrimination complaints from players, but was instead in response to the current political climate in the United States, which is seeing reproductive rights being rolled back in a variety of ways.
Montei points out that it’s all related: “It’s interesting to consider how women athletes are expected to give their bodies over to the sport and therefore to the public—in different ways, pregnant people and mothers also become public property, especially in today's political climate.”
Because there is so little research into postpartum elite athletes returning to sport, many of the ideas about the bodies of those athletes are based on assumptions. Much of it is also “tied up in pseudo-scientific arguments that exercise and women’s reproductive systems don’t mix,” says Yu, pointing out that the argument that exercise can have a damaging effect on the reproductive system is an “age-old argument within sports and sport science.” In addition to that, there are all these cultural ideas about pregnant bodies being fragile and vulnerable.
A group of researchers set out to look at the data on WNBA players returning to the court after having a baby to see if the outcomes supported these cultural narratives. In a paper that has not been published yet, those researchers found that the discrimination against these birthing athletes is unfounded, even from simply a performance perspective.
“We ran the data regression analysis and what it showed is that, actually, after having kids, these people come back at the same level that they left or better,” says Dr. Nefertiti Walker, a professor of sport management at University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-author of the study. “It's literally not in their best interest to treat pregnant people and people who carry children in the ways that they do.”
Walker and her co-authors, Dr. Jill S. Harris, a Professor of Economics at the United States Air Force Academy, and David J. Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University, used a data set that they generated themselves. That data included player performance metrics and player fixed effects from 1997-2019, as well as reported birth years for the first-time mothers during the same time period. The sample of mothers in the study performed better than the average player. However, the mothers tended to be older than the average player, as well, and player performance improves with age (up to a point).
“Since the players who had babies (and played at least two years after giving birth) tend to be slightly older than the rest of the players in the sample, the above average performance makes sense,” the authors conclude. “Relative to their peers, elite basketball players are just as productive one year, two years and multiple years beyond the birthing event.”
Look at Hamby: when she returned to the court last season, she ended up being the only Sparks player— and one of only 35 players in the league itself—to play all 40 games. When Connecticut Sun player DeWanna Bonner came back just six weeks after having twins in 2018, she led the league in minutes played, averaged 17.3 points per game for the Mercury—the third-best on the team—and made the 2018 All-Star team.
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WNBA players are workers, and the athletes of the W who have children—whether they carry them or not—are part of the same struggle facing working mothers in every industry. It’s well-documented that having children has a negative impact on the earning potential and salary of women, whereas men often see an increase in pay after becoming fathers. From simply a labor perspective, there is no evidence to indicate that motherhood is associated with lower productivity for workers.
In many ways, stigma and misconceptions around the performance—and therefore value—of athletes who give birth and return to sport is one of the final frontiers when it comes to women’s sports. This issue was brought to the public’s attention in 2019 when several Nike athletes went public in the New York Times with the ways the company punished athletes for having babies by not offering them a salary during their pregnancy and postpartum period. As a result of that investigation, Nike announced a new contract that guarantees an athlete’s pay and bonuses for 18 months around pregnancy.
From both a human rights perspective and a practical perspective, there is no good reason to discriminate against athletes who have babies. “I also think it's important that we don't paint all birthing people and new mothers as tough athletes pushing through their suffering at any cost—this is why paid leave, work reentry programs, continuous social services, and flexible work arrangements, especially in a society in which domestic and parental labor is rendered invisible and is unpaid, is a feminist issue,” says Montei.
The WNBA is a woman-led organization, with Cathy Englebert becoming the league’s first commissioner in 2019. And both the Aces and the Mercury had women coaches at the time of their players’ complaints regarding the treatment by the organizations—Hammon with the former and Vanessa Nygaard with the latter. But putting women in charge is not enough to undo generations of work culture created by and for men. Women in leadership roles are not automatically going to revolutionize the deeply entrenched sexist norms related to work, productivity, and athletics. That will require time and real effort on the part of the athletes—the workers—themselves.
“Putting people in positions of power and expecting that because they are of a particular identity, it can undo decades of historical mistreatment and decades of discrimination and decades of institutionalized sexism is absolutely ridiculous,” says Walker. “It's just not going to happen.”
Whether the players decide to opt-out of their CBA after this season remains to be seen. There are plenty of reasons for them to do so, from travel and accommodations (teams currently fly commercial and owners have not been allowed to charter their players because it was considered a “competitive advantage”—something the league announced just last week that it will be addressing during this season) to media rights to salary concerns. But chief among those reasons to push for a new CBA could also be the discrimination WNBA players continue to face when they get pregnant and give birth.
“Skylar Diggins-Smith is an amazing player. Support her in going to have a kid, because she's going to do it anyway… and when she comes back, she's going to be the same player or better,” says Walker. “So are you willing to lose that level of talent because you didn't want to create a space where she could thrive?”
This is a fascinating statement because it says that teams can trade players "for any reason" or "no reason at all" but also that it can't be for a reason based on these things... so then they CAN'T trade a player for any reason, can they?