The WNBA’s New Collective Bargaining Agreement Is Changing The Math On Motherhood For Players

On Mother’s Day this Sunday, WNBA players have something new to celebrate this year. The WNBA is providing new family-friendly benefits under its new collective bargaining agreement that give more support and protection for players who want to expand or start a family. 

According to the new agreement, players are receiving new family-planning benefits that require fewer years of service and now extend to their partners and spouses. Pregnant players can veto any attempts a team might make to trade them. The new CBA also creates a “pregnancy and childbirth salary cap exception” whereby pregnant players will receive their full salaries without it counting towards the team’s salary cap. The provision thereby removes the financial incentive to trade that positioned pregnant players as a financial liability under the old agreement. 

This marks a seismic change from the last CBA, which only granted family planning benefits to players with eight or more years of service. In 2018, the Phoenix Mercury opened up a childcare facility for players. All teams will now be required to provide family and nursing rooms. 

The old agreement forbade players from entering into a contract while knowingly pregnant without prior written disclosure to the team. In effect, the league viewed pregnancy through the same lens as an injury, illness, or other physical condition that might impede a player’s ability to perform or fulfill their contractual obligations. This gave players little to no incentive to divulge a pregnancy early to facilitate necessary advanced planning for themselves or their teams. 

Many have been calling the revisions the Hamby Clause, named after WNBA All-Star player Dearica Hamby. Hamby made headlines in 2024 when she filed a lawsuit against the WNBA and her former team, the Las Vegas Aces. 

According to the lawsuit, Hamby alleged that she was traded to the LA Sparks after Las Vegas Aces’ coach Becky Hammon and the team’s front office learned she was pregnant in 2022. Hamby claimed that her pregnancy motivated the team to trade her. In May of 2025, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed all claims against the WNBA while allowing Hamby’s lawsuit against the Las Vegas Aces to move forward.

While Hamby and the Aces ultimately opted to drop the lawsuit in December of 2025, the issues it raised about how WNBA teams handle trades when a player is pregnant informed changes to the WNBA’s recently signed collective bargaining agreement. Now that a player can veto a trade while they are pregnant, it ensures they won’t have to juggle moving to a new city and uprooting their lives while navigating a pregnancy. 

For women in the WNBA seeking to become pregnant, there is no perfect time to have a baby. Part of that conversation is centered on the realities of being a professional athlete, and the other comes down to biology. There is significant overlap between a woman athlete’s peak competitive years and their prime childbearing window. 

Many WNBA players face the prospect of navigating career-defining seasons at a time when starting a family is most biologically viable, as Hamby did, when she became pregnant ahead of a season in which the Las Vegas Aces were seeking to win back-to-back championships.

The W has emerged as a leader in athlete family policy, even when compared to its counterpart, the men’s NBA league. The MNBA has no formal, guaranteed parental leave policy for its players, unlike the WNBA. It is understood that each birth of a child is handled on a case-by-case basis, with players typically missing up to a few games to welcome their new bundles of joy. They are often listed on the game roster as being out for personal reasons. 

For women WNBA players, the calculation and participation in starting or extending a family looks very different. What a man in the MNBA experiences as a brief interruption is, for a pregnant WNBA player, a full reorganization and then reorientation of her body, her career, and her season. They need more than a few games to get back out on the court. Traveling with the team requires medical considerations. Doctors have to be coordinated across cities, prenatal appointments have to fit around road trips, and a baby’s arrival around a calendar that doesn’t pause for her. Pregnancy often unfolds across an entire season, postpartum recovery stretches into the next one, and the return to competitive form requires strenuous work. 

Even after giving birth, the labor only redistributes; it does not lessen. Mothers, whether they carried the pregnancy themselves or became parents through a partner who did, still tend to absorb the bulk of caregiving work in ways their male counterparts rarely do. They are the ones tracking feeding schedules, coordinating pediatrician appointments, managing the household logistics that make travel possible, and holding the weighty cognitive load of supporting a small human’s daily existence. 

For non-birthing parents like Las Vegas Aces’ star point guard Chelsea Gray or Connecticut Sun star Brittney Griner, who have both welcomed children with their respective wives, the caregiving expectations are no less real, even when the body that gave birth to the child belongs to someone else. And while the new CBA has lifted salaries to a place where parenthood is more financially viable, most WNBA players still cannot afford the full-time nannies, private chefs, and round-the-clock household staff that allow NBA fathers to outsource many of the daily logistics that accompany raising a child. The point is that motherhood, however a WNBA player arrives at it, is structured around her in ways that fatherhood rarely is around the men in the league next door.

Plenty of players have successfully juggled motherhood and a career in the WNBA. In fact, there’s a long history of WNBA players who have had children during their careers and returned to the sport after giving birth. Candace Parker gave birth to her first child the season after her rookie year and went on to win multiple championships. Cheyenne Parker-Tyus was pregnant when she was acquired by the Las Vegas Aces in the offseason. She gave birth to her second child, Yoshua, on July 1, 2025, and returned to the Aces lineup on September 9, 2025, just in time for the team’s successful championship run. 

For their part, WNBA teams face the harsh reality that a player who is pregnant may need to stop playing well before the due date. Each player needs a recommended cut-off date for play, so as not to jeopardize the life of the baby they are carrying. This is a decision not made lightly, especially considering the W is a league that has traditionally allowed aggressive, physical play during games. 

Now, a player no longer has to negotiate motherhood as a personal favor, hoping her coach and general manager have empathy, or trust that their goodwill will hold across roster changes. The benefits are now contractual and by definition will survive coaching changes, ownership shifts, league turnover, and trades. The shift from depending on individual decency to enforceable written protections will be tangible. Instead of a player wondering if she can have a family, her focus can be on planning for one. 

For current players, the new protections and benefits allow a career and a family to coexist without one quietly canceling out the other. And, this Mother’s Day, that is a gift for all the women who have given the league their athletic labor who no longer need to choose between the children they want and the careers they are building. It is also a promise to future generations of players that what their predecessors fought for individually will now be theirs automatically.  

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