Help! I Was Denied Boarding While Pregnant.

21.11.2024 - 10:49 / nytimes.com / Paris Olympics

On the evening of July 19, six members of my family were set to fly La Compagnie, a French business-class-only airline, from Newark Liberty International Airport to Nice, France, for a long-planned trip that included the Paris Olympics. When my husband and I arrived at the airport, the other four had already gone through security. The La Compagnie agent congratulated me on my (obvious) pregnancy and asked how far along I was. I answered truthfully: 28 weeks and a day. She said I needed a letter from my doctor saying I was OK to fly. But every doctor and midwife I had spoken to about the trip reassured me it was safe, including the midwife I saw the day before at my 28-week checkup. Even though she was attending someone else’s labor that evening, she managed to send a letter, first through a patient portal and then via email directly to La Compagnie, along with her provider identifier number and, when the staff insisted, a photo of her hospital ID. But even after I did everything they asked, the agent told me the crew had determined I could not board. The La Compagnie desk was closing for the night, and the agent gave me a number to call to rebook. But with no guarantee I would be able to fly, even if there were seats available in the coming days, we booked a flight for the next evening on Air France for about $6,560 each — a steep increase from our $3,530 La Compagnie tickets. La Compagnie offered to return the original $3,530 each, but I believe they were wrong to deny us boarding and should compensate us for the cost of the last-minute flight instead. Can you help?

Your frustrating and ultimately expensive evening in Newark raises a number of questions, but the thorniest is: How much responsibility did you have to verify the pregnancy policy of the airline before you traveled?

It turns out La Compagnie is one of a small group of global airlines — including Turkish, Ryanair, Qantas and Cathay Pacific — that require pregnant passengers to present a medical certificate clearing them to fly once they are past the 28-week mark.

La Compagnie’s written policy states this explicitly, as do those of its fellow outliers. But quite unlike them, the company’s policy is nowhere to be found online — or on any of the documentation you forwarded me.

I finally got my hands on it from Anne Crespo, a spokeswoman for the airline, who in September sent a screenshot from an internal document. The policy states that pregnant passengers between 28 and 35 weeks require a medical certificate confirming their stage of pregnancy and declaring them fit to fly. It specifically notes that a “medical certificate completed by a registered midwife cannot be accepted.”

Ms. Crespo said that the same information was in La Compagnie’s