Even as they've expanded in recent years, the laws protecting pregnant women at work are patchwork and continue to leave out a lot of women, Gedmark said. Discriminating against pregnant women is clearly illegal. But whether a business has to accommodate pregnant women, by giving them a stool to sit on or allowing them more water breaks, remains unclear. Different states have different standards for what kinds of accommodations pregnant workers are legally entitled to receive. Furthermore, the definition of what can be considered a pregnancy-related disability, and therefore requires accommodations, remains elusive among lawmakers on the federal level, as well as in states that lack clear protections.

When it comes to women who make an informed decision to ask for sterilization, everything from age, marital status and previous number of pregnancies to a hospital’s religious affiliation or a doctor’s personal beliefs can be used as a reason to deny care. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists makes these biases explicit in 2007: The procedure “may have important effects on individuals other than the patient,” such as the patient’s husband or partner (whose approval some doctors require). The unusual requirements some doctors impose — waiting periods, age restrictions and psychological evaluations — are similar to those that legislators opposed to abortion have enacted for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies.

Brewaeys saw no significant differences in children’s well-being or in parental stress or emotional involvement between family types. But single mothers by choice did score significantly higher on the amount of social support they received and the amount of support they wanted.

“Get over your biological urges,” Simmons said. “It’s natural to want to have kids, but, sorry, you can’t have it both ways. You have to commit to either career or family. It’s very difficult to have both.”

The difficulty of having kids during residency appears to be discouraging women from becoming surgeons, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston recently found in a survey of 347 active surgeons who had been pregnant during their residencies in the last decade. Just under half the surgeons surveyed said they considered quitting their residencies during pregnancy. About a third said they wouldn’t recommend that women in medical school become surgeons.

Alvarez’s case goes further in defining what “experience” really means to the V.C. community: a woman who breast-fed her children seeks venture capital for products to serve women who breast-feed their children, and yet both her womanhood and her children...are used against her.