Georgetown Law School came under fire for its blistering response to a pregnant student to who asked to take one of her exams early to avoid clashing with her scheduled due date.
Brittany Lovely says school administrators told her on a call ‘motherhood is not for the faint of heart ‘ as she asked for accommodations while preparing to give birth.
Lovely enrolled at Georgetown in Washington D.C. last year and is set to graduate from the rigorous program in 2026.
This year, she and her partner, Tyler Zirker, who is also a Georgetown Law student, found out she was pregnant with a boy.
‘When I found out, I was like “Oh my God.” By the time he’s here, I would still have a year and a half in law school,’ Lovely told The Washington Post.
Little did she know, the problems would start before her first son would be born, when she said school officials denied her request to take her criminal law exam early or from home because it would be unfair to other students.
The exam was scheduled on December 13, more than a week after her December 2 due date.
The law school’s fall semester exam schedule runs from December 6-13, with a December 16-18 serving as dates that students can defer their exams to.
Students have the right to defer their exams if they get sick, if there’s a death in the family, or if a student gives birth to a child during or right before the exam period, according to the university website.
When news of the university’s denial spread across campus, students circulated a petition that called on the administration to grant Lovely’s request to take her exam before her due date. It got thousands of signatures.
But long before schoolwide pressure came down on university leadership, Lovely was shouldering the burden of getting her accommodations approved all on her own.
She had been trying to find a workaround since the fall semester began in September.
On September 11, she reached out to her school’s Title IX coordinator, who asked the law school’s registrar and office of academic affairs if Lovely could take the test early or at home.
Lovely was willing to take the test at home on the scheduled date of December 13 or on the deferral dates of December 16-18.
That’s when she got a denial from school officials, who stated it would be unfair to her classmates.
Lovely then requested a meeting with them and hoped to change their minds.
‘The meeting was horrible,’ Lovely told CNN.
‘They said that I had to come in person no matter what, to take this exam, and the only times that I could take it were between the 13th and the 18th, with the possibility with emergency circumstance to extend it to the morning of the 20th.’
If she couldn’t make this happen, she was allegedly told she would fail the class.
Lovely also said one of the participants told her she ‘should have planned better’ and that ‘motherhood is not for the faint of heart.’
The school administrators Lovely said she spoke with allegedly suggested that Lovely could have someone sit outside the exam room with her newborn baby so she could take breaks to breastfeed him.
With none of her demands met by early November, Lovely revisited the issue.
She drafted and sent a legal memo to the dean describing what she’d been through and citing relevant case law, including Title IX and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
She said the dean responded by saying he didn’t deal with pregnancy scheduling adjustments and pointed her back to the Title IX official she had already been working with to no avail.
The university didn’t confirm Lovely’s account of events, including the controversial call she said she had with school officials.
‘Georgetown is committed to providing a caring, supportive environment for pregnant and parenting students. We have reached a mutually agreeable solution with the student who raised concerns,’ a university spokesperson said in a statement that was circulated to numerous media outlets.
This ‘mutually agreeable solution’ was only reached, Lovely said, after the ‘public outcry’ from her friends and fellow students.
Lovely said Georgetown agreed to extend the period to defer exams, from mid-December into January.
‘That’s great that they figured out a way to do that,’ Lovely said, ‘But why have I been fighting them for months?’
She also asked the university to update its policies around how it handles accommodation requests. She said she was told an official would follow up with her.
‘That hardly feels satisfactory or meaningful, really,’ Zirker said.
