AFLW’s Pregnancy Problem Can’t Stay Swept Under the Rug
A Gold Coast Suns player has been delisted just weeks out from giving birth, and the fallout has reignited a conversation the AFLW has been dodging for way too long. Her camp is calling it discrimination, and honestly, once you sit with the details, it’s hard to see how the league talks its way out of this one.
I’m not going to name her here because the finer points of her contract and the exact timeline are still being argued over, but the broad shape of it is pretty simple. She’s pregnant, she’s due any week now, and the club has moved her on from its list during the very window she should’ve been able to focus on, you know, having a baby. Her supporters reckon that’s a textbook case of a woman being punished for a life event that happens to be biologically impossible for most of her teammates to experience. The club will no doubt point to footy reasons, form, list balance, the usual stuff. But the optics here are rough, and optics matter in a league that’s still fighting for legitimacy in a lot of eyes.
The policy gap nobody wants to own
Here’s the thing that’s bugged me since the AFLW kicked off back in 2017: the competition has never had a genuinely robust, fully resourced pregnancy and parental leave framework that matches what you’d expect from a professional sporting body in 2024. There’s been incremental improvement, sure, some clubs have gotten better at building paid leave into player contracts, but it’s patchy across the competition rather than a guaranteed, ironclad right for every listed player.
Compare that to maternity protections in plenty of other pro sports codes overseas, where a pregnancy can’t be used as grounds to end a playing contract, and where players are guaranteed a pathway back onto the list after they’ve given birth and recovered. The AFLW has talked a big game about being a competition that empowers women, and look, in a lot of ways it legit has. But this is the kind of moment that tests whether that’s a genuine value or just a marketing line.
Why delisting timing actually matters
People who aren’t across footy list management might ask, so what, clubs delist players all the time, that’s footy. And yeah, that’s true. Clubs cut list numbers every single off-season and it’s rarely pretty. But there’s a massive difference between delisting someone because their output on the park has dropped off, and delisting someone during the exact period when she is legally and medically unable to prove her form, train normally, or advocate for herself in the way other players can.
If you’re pregnant and due within weeks, you’re not training full loads, you’re not playing trial matches, you’re not putting your hand up for extra midfield time to impress the list management group. You are, quite reasonably, focused on your body and your baby. Using that window to quietly move someone off the list feels less like a footy decision and a lot more like a club taking the path of least resistance while a player has limited capacity to push back.
Plenty of fans online have been saying this looks like a club working around a player rather than with her, and I reckon that’s a fair call to make even if we don’t know every contractual detail.
What Queensland footy fans actually want to see
Up here in Brisbane we’ve watched AFLW grow from basically a curiosity into something genuinely competitive, with Lions supporters packing out games and treating the women’s program with the same seriousness as the men’s list. That growth only keeps happening if players, especially the ones thinking about starting families, can trust that having a kid won’t torch their career. Young girls coming through academy pathways in Queensland are watching this stuff closely. If the message they take from this is
