Updates in ‘Tennessee v. McMahon’ and ‘Carroll Independent School District v. U.S. Department of Education’
We fought in the courts for a Title IX rule that better protects pregnant and postpartum students.
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Education published new Title IX regulations. This new 2024 Rule covered a range of topics, including the rights of LGBTQ+ students, sexual harassment victims, and pregnant and postpartum students. Protections for this last group included explicit rights to lactation breaks in clean spaces and other “reasonable modifications,” such as permission to eat and drink water in class, excused absences to attend prenatal appointments, adjusted deadlines and exam dates, and bigger desks for growing bellies. Before the 2024 Rule, Title IX’s protections for pregnant and postpartum students were vague and open to divergent interpretations. For example, when attempting to enforce Title IX’s regulations prior to the new rule, the Department of Education had at one point suggested that Title IX requires schools to provide breastfeeding students time and space to express milk. But, because the Title IX regulations did not specifically discuss lactation, schools can, and do, disagree.
In 2025, two federal courts in Kentucky and Texas struck down the 2024 Rule after conservative individuals, organizations, and states brought nine lawsuits across the country challenging the protections that the 2024 Rule afforded LGBTQ+ students. As a result, the Rule’s expanded protections for pregnant students and student-parents were tossed out, too.
The federal government initially defended the 2024 rule in the courts — until the Trump administration took office in 2025. 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: Tennessee v. McMahon and Carroll Independent School District v. U.S. Department of Education. A Better Balance’s goal was to revive the provision of the Rule that provided reasonable protections to pregnancy and postpartum students. The district courts denied A Better Balance’s intervention motion and ABB filed notices of appeal in the Fifth and Sixth Circuits.
On April 24, 2026, the Fifth Circuit issued an en banc decision in U.S. v. Texas that will, in many cases, make it very difficult or impossible for legal services organizations like A Better Balance to seek redress within that circuit. The decision directly impacted A Better Balance’s appeals and, as a result, in May 2026, Public Justice and our client, A Better Balance, made the difficult decision to dismiss the appeals in both cases.
Unfortunately, this means that the 2024 Rule will remain entirely struck down, eliminating the robust and commonsense protections — such as simply receiving an excused absence to attend a prenatal appointment — that it explicitly afforded pregnant and postpartum students.
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 and its corresponding regulations remain in place. Furthermore, as A Better Balance explains, pregnant and postpartum students still have rights and protections, including:
- The right to stay in the same classes and extracurricular activities
- The right to learn free from harassment related to pregnancy or a related condition
- The right to reasonable accommodations, like more frequent bathroom breaks and breaks to express milk.
We will continue working to keep the courthouse doors open.
When people and nonprofit organizations try to hold corporate or government actors accountable for their unlawful actions through the legal system, they often run into a barrier: the standing doctrine. This legal doctrine limits who may sue over misconduct — or, in other words, who gets to stand up and be heard in court. Specifically, a litigant must establish that they’ve actually been injured by the conduct they challenge before the court will even consider the merits of their claims. The standing doctrine is currently being wielded against people and organizations today, making it harder and harder to bring claims to court. And in practice, some judges impose harsher standing requirements on groups they disagree with (like legal services organizations) than those they agree with (like oil companies). The Fifth Circuit’s en banc decision in U.S. v. Texas follows these troubling trends by largely limiting, in the circuit, the ability of legal service organizations to seek judicial relief against unlawful actions that strike at the heart of their mission and disrupt their core services—an inversion of the standing doctrine, which has long recognized such concrete and operational harms.
Although the standing doctrine has become an inequitable barrier that keeps many people from ever having their claims heard in court. Public Justice is committed to challenging these harmful interpretations of the doctrine and ensuring that all people have an ability to seek recourse for unlawful conduct through the judicial system.
Court Filings
Tennessee v. McMahon
Eastern District of Kentucky
Case Page
Carroll Independent School District v. U.S. Department of Education
Northern District of Texas
Case Page