Sponsors (26)
Official title: To amend the Public Health Service Act to provide more opportunities for mothers to succeed, and for other purposes.
Introduced May 7, 2025 by Michelle Fischbach · Last progress May 7, 2025
The bill expands federal maternal and prenatal supports (including services, telehealth, and retroactive child support) and increases transparency, but does so while restricting funding and participation for abortion‑related providers, adding administrative burdens and creating new legal liabilities that shift costs and raise rights and policy concerns.
Pregnant and postpartum women (especially in rural and underserved communities) gain expanded, multi-year federal support — free information, referrals, services, and telehealth equipment — improving prenatal/postpartum access and monitoring.
Pregnant mothers (particularly low-income mothers) can secure court-ordered financial support from biological fathers retroactive to conception, increasing direct financial resources for mothers and infants; courts must consider the mother/child's best interests when setting payments.
Parents, families, and state agencies gain a centralized federal resource (pregnancy.gov) and clearinghouse that improves transparency about licensed child-placement agencies and aggregates federal funding opportunities, making it easier to find services and funding.
Women seeking comprehensive reproductive health care could face reduced access because entities that perform, refer for, or financially support abortion are barred from receiving grants and funds cannot be used for coverage that includes abortion; this narrows provider networks and may bias funded services toward organizations that promote carrying pregnancies to term.
Biological fathers and taxpayers may face increased financial burdens: retroactive support to conception creates new liability for men and will likely spur disputes and litigation over paternity, increasing court costs and administrative burdens on state systems.
Maintaining the federal clearinghouse and complying with new privacy/monitoring standards imposes administrative and budgetary costs on HHS and creates compliance burdens for small nonprofits and states (including the risk that states who fail to report could lose incentive payments).
Based on analysis of 6 sections of legislative text.
Creates a federal pregnancy support clearinghouse, funds nonprofit pregnancy-support grants excluding abortion providers, and allows child-support claims for unborn children.
Requires states to report licensed or accredited private child-placement agencies for publication on a new federal pregnancy support website (pregnancy.gov), conditions certain adoption incentive payments on that reporting, and requires HHS to maintain lists of agencies and federal funding opportunities. Creates a new federal grant program for nonprofit pregnancy support organizations that provide counseling, referrals, and certain direct services while excluding organizations that perform, refer for, or counsel in favor of abortion. Also amends the Social Security Act to let mothers request establishment and enforcement of child-support obligations by biological fathers for an unborn child (potentially beginning as early as conception), allows retroactive collection when paternity is later established, requires courts to consider the best interests of the mother and child in setting amounts, and delays those child-support changes until two years after enactment.