Earlier this week, Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate, was asked about a story that she’s mentioned often on the campaign trail: In 1971, when she was 22 years old and completing her first year of teaching, she lost her job once it became clear that she was visibly pregnant. It was, she tweeted, “an experience millions of women will recognize.”

But over the past few days, conservative news sites and mainstream outlets either have sought to directly refute Warren’s account or have disputed it in such a way that it seems as if there’s some reason to doubt that a school in the early 1970s would fire a pregnant woman. But that kind of discrimination continues today. (As The New York Times documented earlier this year, American companies still “systematically sideline” pregnant women by, for instance, passing them over for promotions.)