We fought in the courts for a Title IX rule that better protects pregnant and postpartum students.

In 2025, two federal courts in Kentucky and Texas struck down the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX Rule after conservative individuals, organizations, and states brought nine lawsuits across the country challenging the 2024 Rule. As a result, the Trump administration’s harmful 2020 Title IX Rule in schools once again took effect nationwide.

When the Trump administration took office in 2025, the federal government stopped defending the 2024 Rule. Public Justice — together with our co-counsel at Braun Hagey & Borden LLP, Jeeves Mandel Law Group, P.C., and Pillersdorf Law Offices — sought to intervene in both cases on behalf of A Better Balance, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services for pregnant and postpartum students. A Better Balance asked to join the lawsuit as a defendant so it could appeal the district court’s decision and try to revive a provision of the regulation that provides protections to pregnancy and postpartum students, such as the right to reasonable modifications (like a larger desk, adjusted exam dates, and excused absences for prenatal care), lactation breaks with a private space to express milk, and assistance from a school’s Title IX coordinator to ensure accommodations are provided. The district courts denied ABB’s intervention motion and ABB filed notices of appeal in the Fifth and Sixth Circuits.

On April 24, 2026, the Fifth Circuit issued a decision in a case called US v. Texas that will, in many cases, make it very difficult or impossible for legal services organizations to seek redress in the courts. The decision directly impacted ABB’s appeal and, as a result, in May 2026, Public Justice, along with our partners at A Better Balance, made the difficult decision to dismiss the appeals in both cases.

Unfortunately, this means the Biden administration’s 2024 Rule will remain entirely struck down, and the Trump administration’s 2020 Rule stays in effect nationwide, which reverts back to earlier definitions of what is considered to be “reasonable and responsive” standards of accommodations. The 2020 rule also treats “pregnancy, childbirth, false pregnancy, termination of pregnancy and recovery therefrom in the same manner and under the same policies as any other temporary disability” for students participating in an educational program or activity.

Read on to learn more about student survivors’ Title IX rights under the 2020 Rule and how courts are misusing the law to block civil rights lawsuits.

Pregnant and postpartum students still have Title IX (and non-Title IX) protections:

Although the 2024 Title IX Rule was struck down, the Title IX statute, which was passed by Congress in 1972, remains in place. Furthermore, according to A Better Balance, pregnant and postpartum students still have rights and protections, including:

  • The right to stay at your school versus participating in a separate, not comparable program
  • The right to stay in the same classes and extracurricular activities
  • The right to learn free from harassment
  • The rigiht to reasonable accommodations, like more frequent bathroom breaks and breaks to express milk.
  • A full list of rights for pregnant and postpartum students can be found here.

We will continue working to keep the courthouse doors open for people with valid civil rights claims.

In a troubling trend, some judges are making it harder and harder for people and organizations with whom they ideologically disagree to go to court. One way they’re doing it is through “standing” doctrine. Standing is a judge-made constitutional requirement: in order to bring a case in court, you need to have been actually injured—you can’t just disagree with the other side in the abstract. In practice, some judges impose harsher standing requirements on folks they disagree with (like legal services organizations) than folks they agree with (like oil companies).

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently explained in a dissent, when it comes to standing, while the Supreme Court has taken a “stern stance . . . in cases concerning the rights of ordinary citizens,” it takes “a remarkably lenient approach” where the plaintiff is a powerful party it favors. As she put it, “such selectivity begets judicial overreach and erodes public trust in the impartiality of judicial decisionmaking.” Since lower courts follow and can expand on the Supreme Court’s decisions, courts at all levels engage in this selectivity, often finding that wealthy people and multinational corporations have standing—and ordinary people and nonprofits don’t.

This is a disturbing trend. We will continue to make the case for fair standing doctrine so that ordinary people and the organizations that advocate for them can seek justice through the courts.

Court Filings

Tennessee v. McMahon: Case Page 
        Eastern District of Kentucky

Carroll Independent School District v. Department of Education: Case Page
       Northern District of Texas