New NCAA policy: safety, equity for pregnant athletes.

Soon after Dr. Elizabeth A. Sorensen became the first woman faculty athletics representative at Wright State University in Dayton OH in 2002-03, athletics director Dr. Michael Cusack brought the council a question. Two student athletes had become pregnant; one lost her scholarship and the other did not. What should be the university's policy?

Interested as a nurse and untenured assistant professor of nursing, Sorensen requested six months to research the issue. "For nurses, pregnancy is a normal developmental event," she told WIHE. It's a health condition that requires monitoring. It doesn't mean a woman's life has to stop.

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She set out to learn what other schools were doing. The more she found out, the more concerned she became. Only three schools had pregnancy policies; most left it to the discretion of coaches or naively said the issue didn't arise.

No previous research on the subject existed. Her growing files included relevant legal, medical, social and psychological data. Was pregnancy inadvisable for high-level athletic activity? How many student athletes became pregnant? She collected accounts of pregnant student athletes and what became of them.

She wrote the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 2003 to point out a problem with the NCAA Division I bylaws. They list reasons a school can't take away a scholarship, such as injury, and reasons it can. The latter list includes the student's voluntary withdrawal, misrepresentation or grievous misconduct. That leaves a lot to interpretation; does it count as withdrawing voluntarily if a student says she can't play because she's pregnant?

The NCAA did not answer Sorensen's 2003 letter.