Stuff's getting real.

As many of you know, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is starting to sue employers who it claims are not complying with the reasonable accommodation requirements of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Check out the press releases here, here, here (in this case, conciliation), here, and here (another conciliation). And that's just in the first half of October.

I reported during the summer that the regulations issued by the EEOC are pretty draconian, even if you (like me) believe that employers should make reasonable accommodations for pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions.

In light of the flurry of EEOC litigation, I thought it might be a good idea to go over these top four pregnancy accommodation DON’Ts. If you DON'T want to be sued by the EEOC, then DON'T do these things:

No. 1: DON’T think you can just follow your old ADA procedures in pregnancy accommodation cases. In one of the lawsuits filed by the EEOC, the employer apparently did just that: When the employee requested pregnancy accommodation, the employer sent its disability-related forms to her physician, asking for all kinds of documentation about her medical issues.

The documentation that you can request in connection with pregnancy accommodation is much more limited than what you can do in handling a request for accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act or similar law. To wit:

• At most, all you can request is (1) confirmation of the pregnancy, and (2)...

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