Pregnancy, poverty, and precarious visas: how migrant women are punished for having children

When Zinhle’s* baby was born in April 2025, he arrived more than three weeks early via an emergency C-section. He was very small. Zinhle puts this down to the immense stress she was under from the moment she told her sponsor about the pregnancy until the birth.

Back in Spring 2023, Zinhle was living in with her two young children. Hearing about the UK’s recruitment drive for care workers, she searched online for an agency hiring workers from abroad. As she already had experience doing care work, she found a role relatively quickly, securing sponsorship with an agency to work 40 hours a week for £23,000 a year. 

Unbeknown to Zinhle, the one-year-old company had just £1,000 in assets when they offered her the role (according to Companies House filings). Despite its minuscule resources, the Home Office granted this agency a licence to sponsor migrant workers. As of January 2026, it still holds its licence. 

With her job offer, sponsorship and visa secured, Zinhle sold everything she had, including furniture from her children’s bedroom, to pay the cost of flights and relocation to the North of England. She arrived in July 2023, ready to start work as per her contract. But following three weeks of shadow shifts, no work materialised. 

The company simply told Zinhle there was no work for her to do - though they 'believed there would be soon'. But without savings or access to public funds like Job Seekers Allowance, Zinhle needed to earn to survive. The next month, she found part-time work with another care agency on a zero-hours contract. 

Her Health and Care Worker visa stipulated that she could work no more than 20 hours a week outside her usual sponsored role, leaving her earning barely enough to scrape by. Things were difficult, but she continued to work in this way hoping that either her sponsor would fulfil their promise of a salaried full-time role, or the zero-hours agency would take over her sponsorship. 

Around a year later, Zinhle fell pregnant. She told her sponsor at a pre-organised supervision meeting (these meetings took place every three to four months, despite no work being offered). They did a pregnancy risk assesment, but given no work had ever been offered to her, nothing changed.

Zinhle next told the zero-hours agency around a week later. She’d had to miss shifts to attend hospital appointments and to cope with the physical effects of pregnancy, and knew she needed to tell her employer. She was crushed by their response. 

A message in the work WhatsApp group was posted the next day. It read: “all ladies should know that once they get pregnant they cannot pick up shifts as this is the company policy." She thought this was discriminatory, but was told that as a zero-hours contract agency, they felt it was too risky for her to work while pregnant and were under no obligation to offer her work. (This was, in fact, textbook direct discrimination: pregnant workers on zero-hours contracts are entitled to maternity leave and sick leave, as well as protection from dismissal, discrimination and unfair treatment). 

Abandoned on all fronts

Barred from working shifts with the agency, and still denied work from her sponsor, Zinhle had no way of supporting herself. Despite losing her source of income for reasons beyond her control, the NRPF condition excluded her from claiming any state benefits, including Universal Credit or Housing Allowance during her pregnancy, or from claiming a Maternity Expenses Payment or Child Benefit following the birth. 

Terminating the pregnancy felt like the only way out. She considered whether an abortion would enable her to return to work, ending her dire financial situation, but her partner would not allow it. “I asked him: 'can we have a termination so that we can just end all of this and I can go back to work?' But he was literally against an abortion”, she says.

To make matters worse, at around six months pregnant, Zinhle was forced to leave the house of her partner due to a breakdown in their relationship. This made her homeless. Around this time, she experienced a mental health crisis and was admitted to hospital following an overdose. 

Although Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) is not classed as a public fund, and therefore is claimable by sponsored workers, Zinhle’s sponsor argued that she did not qualify because she had not been employed by them for the required period before childbirth. At the time, she didn't know she could claim SMP from the zero-hours agency, and they did not tell her this. Though she was entitled to Statutory Maternity Allowance (currently less than £200 a week), this required her to submit payslips as proof of income, something she did not have from her sponsor. 

Zinhle was left with no income, no state support, and no partner. Hitting crisis point, a member of the Zimbabwean community took her in for the months leading up to the birth. 

Zinhle believes that both her sponsor, who brought her to the UK with the promise of a stable job, and the zero-hours agency, which discriminated against her due to pregnancy, are responsible for the dire situation she found herself in. 

Her experience of pregnancy discrimination at work is shocking, but it is not uncommon. Potentially 74,000 women a year are fired, or made redundant while pregnant or on maternity leave, according to research published in 2025 by Pregnant Then Screwed, in partnership with Women in Data. But victims of pregnancy discrimination who are subject to NRPF receive a double blow.  

Had Zinhle been granted the safety net of public funds during this vulnerable time, she might not have suffered the horrific stress, destitution and homelessness she did, as she brought her baby into the world. She might, even, have felt more able to exert her rights against the discrimination she suffered.

Three months after the birth of her son, and after stringing her along as an employee for more than two years without providing any work, Zinhle’s sponsor dismissed her. She is now searching for a new employer to take over her sponsorship before her visa is curtailed by the Home Office. This is a difficult task at any time, let alone while recovering from childbirth and with a newborn.

Sponsorship limits reproductive choices 

Following her dismissal, Zinhle approached the Work Rights Centre in November 2025 for urgent legal support. Our employment team advised Zinhle that she had a strong case against her sponsor for unfair dismissal, pregnancy discrimination, unlawful deductions from wages, and outstanding holiday pay and notice pay. However, due to the acute destitution she was experiencing, she sought a settlement to avoid a potentially lengthy legal battle. This will go some way to alleviate her immediate financial suffering, but is far less than the amount she could have pursued at the tribunal. 

It is widely known by now that the post-Brexit system of sponsorship which ties an individual to their employer, is at high risk of abuse. If a sponsor fails to offer the work they promised, there is little the individual can do but find alternative work limited to 20-hours a week - most often in precarious zero-hours roles.

Half of those who responded to a survey of migrant care workers conducted by the Work Rights Centre in 2025, reported non-provision of working hours. With the power to cancel a sponsorship at any time, sponsors hold tremendous power over their employees, who see little choice but to acquiesce to their boss’s every demand. 

There's a gendered element to this issue, too. Migrant women on sponsored visas and subject to NRPF have their reproductive choices severely constrained. Choosing to proceed with a pregnancy puts a sponsored worker not only at risk of discrimination or losing their job, but also losing their visa. To avoid the threat of deportation, many feel pressure to terminate a pregnancy.

Whatever they do, migrant women are punished for their reproductive choices. Living as a migrant woman in the UK should not mean a binary choice between working or having a child. The NRPF condition must be lifted for victims of pregnancy discrimination to prevent their new family falling into poverty, and this government must take responsibility for the sponsored workers who fall into destitution as a result of the flawed immigration system ministers refuse to reform.

*Name changed for privacy