Alabama Senator Katie Britt, who gained national attention after her controversial response to President Joe Biden’s state of the union, proposed a sweeping set of legislation, which would enable child support payments to begin during pregnancy and establish a national clearinghouse of pregnancy care providers, except those which provide abortion-related services.
The “More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed,” or MOMS Act, which garnered co-sponsors including Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), creates specific carve-outs barring an entity that “performs, induces, refers for, or counsels in favor of abortions” from receiving funding or placement on a new Pregnancy.gov website, including swaths of OB-GYN services and sexual health clinics across the country.
The website would create a federal database of “relevant resources” for pregnant women, as well as ask users for contact information that the government could use to “conduct outreach via phone or email.” Critics, including former Kentucky Senate candidate Amy McGrath, say this amounts to a database of pregnant people.
“According to the GOP, America needs a national registry for pregnant women along with the federal government tracking women's menstrual cycles,” McGrath said on X.
The bill also outlines the creation of a database of “pregnancy support centers,” or crisis centers, which critics say provide women with misleading information in an effort to keep them from having abortions. Britt’s state of Alabama already has some of the nation’s strictest abortion bans, currently barring women from seeking any termination except in the case of saving a mother’s life.
The program further changes the mechanics of child support at a federal level to enable women to seek support from sexual partners upon conception, swapping out existing language from “child” to “unborn child.”
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