Cite as: 506 U. S. 263 (1993)
Stevens, J., dissenting
In Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U. S. 484 (1974), we faced the question whether a State's disability insurance system violated the Fourteenth Amendment by excluding benefits for normal pregnancy. A majority of the Court concluded that the system did not constitute discrimination on the basis of sex prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause. Geduldig, of course, did not purport to establish that, as a matter of logic, a classification based on pregnancy is gender neutral. As an abstract statement, that proposition is simply false; a classification based on pregnancy is a sex-based classification, just as, to use the Court's example, a classification based on the wearing of yarmulkes is a religion-based classification. Nor should Geduldig be understood as holding that, as a matter of law, pregnancy-based classifications never violate the Equal Protection Clause. In fact, as the language of the opinion makes clear, what Geduldig held was that not every legislative classification based on pregnancy was equivalent, for equal protection purposes, to the explicitly gender-based distinctions struck down in Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U. S. 677 (1973), and Reed v. Reed, 404 U. S. 71 (1971). That Geduldig must be understood in these narrower terms is apparent from the sentence which the Court quotes in part: "While it is true that only women can become pregnant, it does not follow that every legislative classification concerning pregnancy is a sex-based classification like those considered in Reed, supra, and Frontiero, supra." Geduldig, 417 U. S., at 496, n. 20 (emphasis added).24
Central to the holding in Geduldig was the Court's belief that the disability insurance system before it was a plan that
24 To his argument quoted in n. 19, supra, Professor Sunstein adds: "It is by no means clear that Geduldig would be extended to a case in which pregnant people were (for example) forced to stay indoors in certain periods, or subjected to some other unique criminal or civil disability." 92 Colum. L. Rev., at 32, n. 122.
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