Emily Erroa was eight months pregnant when she found out she was being fired from her human resources job at the Department of Energy.
“It stressed me out to the point where I did have to go into the hospital because I felt as though I caused too much stress to the baby,” she told NBC News. “They were calling me saying, ‘Oh, you’re fired. Oh, never mind. You’re not fired. You’re not on the list.’ And then they call me back and said, ‘You are on the list.’ These were way after work hours, and it was constant emails, daily things, and so now it’s affected everything.”
Erroa, a 38-year-old Army veteran and reservist, was based in Texas. Now, she's had to move to Kansas City, Missouri, to be closer to family.
"It’s not like I could just say, ‘Oh, well, fine, I’ll just go get another job.’ I’m visibly pregnant. Nobody would ever hire me in their right mind, even though it’s discrimination," she said. "But we live in reality, right? They would not hire me, and plus, I would need to have time off. My baby is due April 17."
Thousands of federal workers have been fired from their government jobs in recent weeks amid efforts from President Donald Trump, his billionaire adviser Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. But for Erroa and women like her, who are pregnant, the stakes are more challenging and complex.
NBC News spoke with a half dozen pregnant federal workers — both international and domestic — who recently lost their jobs and expressed concerns about unexpectedly looking for work, staying insured while needing prenatal care, and how the stress would affect their babies.
A White House spokesperson defended the recent federal layoffs.
"President Trump returned to Washington with a mandate from the American people to bring about unprecedented change in our federal government uprooting waste, fraud, and abuse," White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in a statement. "While this isn’t easy to do in a broken system entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, it’s a necessary task for future generations."
When Anna Conn, a 35-year-old who lives in Asheville, North Carolina, was abruptly fired from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention while eight months pregnant, she said it plunged her life into turmoil. Her government health insurance expires before her due date, but so far, switching to her husband’s plan hasn’t been possible, she said. As an above-the-knee amputee, she has additional health concerns tied to the pregnancy, involving costs related to a new prosthetic.
“They may need a document stating the exact date of coverage, which the federal government had not provided,” Conn, 35, said of switching to her husband’s insurance.
Conn was among those caught up in blanket, mass firings in which employees universally received a termination notice stating they were fired for poor performance. That’s despite Conn saying she scored excellent performance reviews.
And the timing of her firing, coming while she's in the third trimester of pregnancy, has put her in a difficult situation for applying for unemployment help. Conn noted she would be required to apply for a minimum number of jobs every week to qualify for unemployment assistance.
“With a brand-new baby,” she said. “That idea may go out the window.”
Gracie Lynn, 32, was recently fired from her job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Lynn, who lives in Eugene, Oregon, and said she had been seeing a maternal fetal specialist over concerns of a potential heart issue for the baby, was immediately worried she would face thousands of dollars of additional bills. She said the doctors think the baby will be fine, but it took the federal government two weeks to give her the paperwork that allowed her to apply for temporary continuation of coverage for health care.
“Being six months pregnant, it was really stressful, because I knew, I knew that we had these two big doctors appointments coming up in the coming days. We had an appointment on Tuesday, and we had a fetal heart echo coming up on the Friday, like eight days after I got fired, and I immediately was like, ‘I need to know I’m going to be on health insurance,’” Lynn said. “‘Like, who do I ask? How do I know when this ends?’”
Emily, a Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Agency for International Development employee who spoke with NBC News on the condition that her surname not be published, said she spent years working nights and weekends during international conflicts, saving up her earned paid time off for a planned maternity leave.
After banking hundreds of hours of time off, she planned to extend the government’s policy of three months of paid maternity leave to five months when she gave birth later this year.
Then, at 11 weeks pregnant, Emily was told her contract had been terminated and she’d be out of a job in just 15 days. On the day she expected to finish her job, her contract was extended for another six weeks. While some of her saved PTO will be paid out, she said they'll cap the amount and she'll forfeit half of her saved time.
Natasha Weinstein, 38, said she was flying back home to the Washington, D.C., area from an international vacation when she got a text from her manager saying she and her fellow USAID workers had been locked out of the building.
Weinstein said she spent the next two weeks unsure if she had a job, before learning at 21 weeks pregnant that her contract would be terminated. Despite her colleagues' advising her against it, she returned to the office during this time to retrieve her personal belongings from her desk.
“I was just like, no, they have hundreds of dollars with my personal items, photos, sonogram photos. I’m just not leaving that stuff there,” she said. “I said, you know, they took our jobs, they took our country, but they’re not taking my shoes, because all my work shoes were there. So now the group chat is called ‘They can’t take our shoes.’”
Weinstein said that the termination is challenging for her family's finances and that being fired by a mass email that didn't even include her name was “insulting.”
“I’m doing my best to not get super, super stressed about all of it, because I have lost a pregnancy in like third trimester before. So I’m trying to just like stay calm and relax about everything, but it is terrifying in a lot of ways,” she said.
Another former USAID employee, who spoke with NBC News on the condition of anonymity, lost her job at 29 weeks pregnant. She lives abroad and because of it, she won’t qualify for any unemployment or family leave benefits in the U.S. or her home country.
The employee, who was deployed by the agency to the Middle East earlier in her pregnancy, said being fired stretches her finances and will prevent her husband from taking unpaid time off, too.
“Looking down the barrel of being pregnant and giving birth and then taking a couple months, ideally, to recover. The soonest I’m going to be applying to jobs is August,” she said.
“The soonest I’m going to get a job is October, November, and that’s like best-case scenario,” she said. “I’m looking at basically nine months — if not a year — of no income.”
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