The International Cricket Council (ICC) this week released its first framework of dos and don’ts for boards managing players who become pregnant during their careers, making it the latest sporting body to recognise the necessity of supporting women athletes.
The ICC framework, titled ‘Return to Play Post Pregnancy Guidelines‘, includes recommendations on medical check-ins, travel support, alternative employment and contract extensions.
But these are not binding. The recommendations, ICC said in the document, can be “subject to any applicable local legislation or regulations in the relevant cricket playing country”.
Players who said the support wasn’t there
Over the past few years, players who became pregnant during their careers have spoken publicly about systems that left them to manage alone.
Before 2020, a player in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) in the US was contractually entitled to only half her salary while on pregnancy leave. That clause is among the reasons Dallas Wings guard Skylar Diggins-Smith played the 2018 season without telling her team she was pregnant. She later told the media that she couldn’t afford to disclose it.
In 2019, Diggins-Smith said she managed to take months off to recover from postpartum depression, but it was possible because the Wings chose, voluntarily, to give her full pay and exceed what the league’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) required of the team.
“Having no support from your own organisation is unfortunate,” she wrote at the time. Her experience helped shape the WNBA’s 2020 CBA, which guaranteed full salary during maternity leave for the first time, a $5,000 annual childcare stipend, and two-bedroom apartments for players with children.
In football, maternity regulations have been mandatory since January 2021, when the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) began requiring clubs to pay full salary through a player’s pregnancy and give at least 14 weeks of leave.
Despite the rules, Icelandic midfielder Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir found that the French club Olympique Lyonnais had stopped paying her during her 2021 pregnancy, citing the country’s sick-leave provisions instead of Fifa’s regulations. She alleged that no one from the club checked on her welfare throughout.
“They had a responsibility to look after me, and they didn’t,” the midfielder said.
Gunnarsdóttir won a Fifa Dispute Resolution Chamber ruling in 2022, the first case to be decided under the new regulations. She later joined a players’ taskforce that helped develop a 48-page ‘Postpartum Return to Play Guide for the global players’ union FIFPRO (Fédération Internationale des Associations de Footballeurs Professionnels), published in August 2024.
Pakistani batter Nain Abidi also spoke about struggling with isolation and her mental health after the birth of her son in 2019, when there wasn’t any parental policy (Pakistan Cricket Board introduced one in 2021). Abidi said she found the postpartum period isolating and drifted out of the team’s senior side. “I would have availed of it if the PCB had offered me any such policy,” she said later.
WNBA basketballer Dearica Hamby’s case was controversial.
Her club, the Las Vegas Aces, traded her to the Los Angeles Sparks in January 2023, months after she announced a pregnancy that, she alleged, the team used against her. The Aces denied this.
After the transfer, Hamby posted on social media that she had been “bullied, manipulated, and discriminated against”.
Her 2024 lawsuit didn’t end well for her after a judge dismissed her claims against WNBA in 2025. Hamby and the Aces mutually agreed to drop the remaining suit in December 2025, with no finding of fault on either side.
But the controversy fed into the WNBA’s new CBA, ratified in March 2026, which now requires a club to get a pregnant player’s consent before trading her. US media often refer to this provision as the “Hamby Clause”, though the official documents carry no such name.
In India, a dispute played out in court this year. Wrestler Vinesh Phogat, who gave birth to her first child in July 2025, was ruled ineligible for Asian Games 2026 selection trials after a new Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) policy restricted participation to medal winners from domestic tournaments held during the very months she took a maternity sabbatical.
Phogat moved the Delhi High Court, which granted her interim relief in May, holding that “motherhood cannot be treated as a professional impediment” and that the policy appeared prima facie arbitrary and exclusionary.
(The underlying case remains pending before a single judge; Phogat was one of the 2023 protesters who had accused the then WFI president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexual harassment, and has had an adversarial relationship with the federation since).
The WFI appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard the matter ahead of the trials and allowed Phogat to take part.
ICC’s recommendations
The ICC guidelines are built around what the document calls the “6 Rs” — “Ready, Review, Restore, Recondition, Return, Refine” — a postpartum rehabilitation framework that maps a roughly 16-week path from early recovery to full training load.
Beyond that framework, the document lists practical recommendations for boards. This includes continued access to training facilities through pregnancy and postpartum, a designated case manager, usually a doctor or physiotherapist; nursing and childcare space at venues; and assistance with travel, visas and excess baggage so that a caregiver and infant can accompany a player to camps and tournaments.
On financial security, the guidelines suggest boards “consider alternative employment opportunities within the cricket organisation such as coaching, analysis or administration” for players unable to compete because of pregnancy, alongside extending contractual arrangements to support an eventual return.
In cricket
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) does not have a pregnancy or maternity policy of its own, but PTI has reported that Indian women cricketers fall under the country’s general labour-law entitlement of six months’ paid maternity leave.
Among other countries, Cricket Australia was among the first major boards to introduce a parental leave policy, in 2019. The board guarantees pregnant players 12 months of paid leave, a guaranteed contract extension, three weeks’ paid leave for partners, and travel and accommodation support for a child and carer until the child turns four.
New Zealand Cricket separately retained Amy Satterthwaite‘s central contract through her own 2019 pregnancy, making her the first international cricketer given paid maternity leave by her board. She nonetheless retired from international cricket in 2022, about two years after her comeback from maternity leave.
Pakistan’s PCB too introduced its Parental Support Policy in May 2021. It guarantees women cricketers 12 months of fully paid maternity leave and an automatic contract extension on return.
Pakistan team Captain Bismah Maroof was the policy’s first beneficiary five years ago. She took a break beginning in April 2021, gave birth to her daughter in August that year, and led Pakistan at the 2022 One Day International (ODI) World Cup in New Zealand six months later. Maroof travelled for the tournament with her daughter and her mother, who was a PCB-funded support person.
The image of a national team’s captain holding her child in a World Cup dugout is considered one of cricket’s iconic off-field moments.
West Indies leg-spinner Afy Fletcher, who gave birth to her son in 2021 and is playing the ongoing World Cup, called the ICC framework “one of the best things they could have done for women’s cricket”.