Weeks after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a then-little-known Republican congressman from Louisiana introduced a short bill that proposed amending the Social Security Act to ensure child support payments be made for an “unborn child.”
“The Unborn Child Support Act” has gone nowhere. But the congressman has. He’s Mike Johnson, now the speaker of the House. More than two years after the Dobbs decision and nearly a year into a job that gives him control over which legislation get debated and voted on, Johnson hasn’t touched the bill or any of its provisions.
That’s far from unique. CNN’s review of dozens of pledges made and bills introduced to help mothers and children living in a post-Roe America found little action, either in Washington or in state capitals where abortion bans were quickly put in place.
Abortion remains a dominant political issue going into November up and down the ballot. But on the state level, despite much fast and thorough action to ban or limit the procedure mostly in Republican-led states, only a handful of measures have been enacted to address the aftermath of those bans. In several places where politicians have spoken at length about the need to do more to help mothers and children, like in Iowa, or where bills were introduced only to stall out, like in Missouri, any substantive laws passed related to the post-Dobbs reality have only solidified those restrictions.
Few of those new laws are about mothers during their pregnancies or after. Few address child care, for infants or beyond. Even as independent researchers find the number of births going up – as well as higher rates of maternal and infant mortality and greater economic insecurity – in states where abortions are most limited, there’s been little substantive legislative action in response.
“For many pro-lifers, this has just not been in their lane before. It’s been, ‘We have Roe, how do we chip away at Roe?’” said Samuel Lee, a deacon who’s the director of Campaign Life Missouri, an anti-abortion group that runs pregnancy centers but also pushes for funding increases for housing, child care and other measures.
Across the country, that’s led to an unlikely alliance of activists, advocates and economists across the spectrum on reproductive rights who complain that anti-abortion politicians haven’t followed up with enough effort to prioritize and protect life.
Since Dobbs, seven states have had ballot initiatives on the topic, with the abortion rights position winning in each state. In November, at least 10 more initiatives aimed at restoring or protecting abortion rights will be in front of voters across the country. But those measures only address the issue of abortion itself – not what happens if the procedure is restricted.
“The analogy is true of the dog finally catching the mail truck and not knowing what to do,” said Josh Brahm, the CEO of the anti-abortion Equal Rights Institute, who believes legal abortion should have never been a right that Roe recognized in the Constitution. But Brahm has also rallied an array of political, faith, academic, medical and advocacy leaders into a coalition called “Building a Post-Roe Future” that calls for more affordable health care and child care, expanded child tax credits, paid parental leave, flexible work hours and enforced pre-natal support.
In an appearance in Georgia on Friday to criticize that state’s six-week abortion ban, Kamala Harris accused GOP legislators of being “hypocrites” when it comes to caring about women and families. “These hypocrites want to start talking about ‘This is in the best interest of women and children’?” the vice president told a somber room in Atlanta. “Well, where you been? Where you been when it comes to taking care of the women and children of America?”
In a late Friday night post on Truth Social, former President Donald Trump wrote in all capital letters that if he wins, “WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES, AND A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE.”
The former president then read out the post at his Saturday campaign rally in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Scattered efforts to take action
Scattered efforts have been made toward what people like Tate Reeves – the Republican governor of Mississippi, where the Dobbs case had originated – call a “culture of life.”
In Mississippi, that includes laws establishing a foster parent’s bill of rights and a maximum state income tax credit of $10,000 toward adoption costs. Elsewhere, Kentucky established a Lifeline for Moms maternal psychiatry access program. In Ohio, where voters last year effectively overturned a strict 2019 ban that temporarily came into effect with Dobbs, the legislature’s big move on child care was allowing breastfeeding mothers to be excused from jury duty.
Though paid parental leave has been a big topic of discussion around the country, the only states to enact such measures since Dobbs are those where abortion rights are protected.
North Carolina’s 2023 ban on abortions after 12 weeks, passed via a supermajority overriding the Democratic governor’s veto, included increased funding for contraceptive services, measures to reduce infant and maternal mortality, and paid maternity leave for state employees – which state Senate leader Phil Berger and other Republican legislators propelling the ban acknowledged on several occasions were specific responses to abortion rights activists’ complaints that conservatives only ever focus on bans.
But in a state that sees over 120,000 births each year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the law provides $70 million in annually recurring funds for these and other services – which comes out to about $583 per birth – and another $15 million in one-time infusions around foster care, as well as a provision expanding the scope of what midwives can do.
“It’s a been a growing revelation for some legislators,” said Lee, who has testified in favor of several bills he hopes will foster conditions under which women are less likely to want or seek abortions in the first place and also have resources available to them and their children in the absence of the procedure.
“It’s not just about stopping abortions,” Lee said. “It’s about helping women, whatever their circumstances are.”
Where efforts were killed and promises didn’t materialize
Because of a “trigger law” waiting on the books, Missouri’s ban on abortions except to save the life of the mother kicked in only six minutes after the Dobbs decision was announced.
It’s also the rare state where there has been a committed, bipartisan effort to enact laws addressing what comes next, with Republican state Rep. Brenda Shields, in 2023 and again in 2024, introducing legislation to create tax credits to pay for child care.
By Shields’ numbers, the effects of such a measure would have boosted the state economy by over a billion dollars.
“Children have to be in a safe, loving quality program, and we have to help provide that. It’s just unaffordable for working middle-class families if we don’t help,” Shields, now a grandmother but with clear memories of her own time as a working mother, said in an interview in the spring. “They are people who want to bring children into this world to love and have a family, but they also have to work to be able to do that.”
Republicans supported the bill. Democrats did too. The Missouri Chamber of Commerce and groups like Lee’s Campaign Life Missouri were also on board. Republican Gov. Mike Parson backed the effort, as did Crystal Quade, the Democratic leader in the state House and a working mom, who has since become her party’s nominee to succeed Parson.
The bill passed the state House earlier this year but floundered in the state Senate. After it collapsed in the spring, Shields told CNN she gave up and started looking for another way in.
“We will have to continue as a state to address this issue. We can’t just walk away and think it’s going to resolve itself,” Shields said.
Around the same time, another bill did get through: The governor signed into law legislation that cut Medicaid funding to the remaining Planned Parenthood facilities in the state performing non-abortion-related health care.
The end result in Missouri is that in the two-and-a-half years since Dobbs, the only measures meant to address the fallout amount to a few million dollars’ worth of legislation, including tax credits for adoption and tax exemptions for child care facilities.
To Quade, this is evidence that legislators opposed to abortion rights are not really “pro-life.”
“It’s a shame that they have been able to take hold of a phrase that means so much for so many people,” Quade said. “When I say I’m a pro-life legislator, it’s because I want women to have health care and aren’t sent home to bleed out because they’re not close enough to death.”
A few hundred miles away in Iowa, anti-abortion leaders made big promises about how they would address the consequences of Dobbs. But the most significant action was legislating around court challenges to a law that restricts abortion to as early as six weeks.
When Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the law “prohibiting and requiring certain actions relating to abortion involving the detection of a fetal heartbeat, and including effective date provisions” in July 2023, she also cited the “culture of life,” explaining that “as a pro-life governor, I will continue to promote policies designed to surround every person involved in a pregnancy with protection, love, and support.” A few months later, Iowa state House Speaker Pat Grassley said that Republicans “need to look at things like adoption,” adding that “over-the-counter (birth control) needs to be part of what we’re looking at within our caucus.”
In an interview earlier this year with “Iowa Press” discussing the bill passed the previous summer, Grassley said, “If we really believe in what we did in July to protect life, I think these conversations are the next step in that.”
Grassley helped pass legislation in March this year that defines life as starting at conception and bestows “personhood” rights, which increase penalties for people involved in abortions by criminalizing the death of an “unborn person.”
Despite those earlier statements, no bills about adoption or contraception access have passed in Iowa. Zach Wahls, a Democratic state senator in Iowa, told CNN that in his chamber, he couldn’t even get a subcommittee hearing for a “right to contraception” bill he co-sponsored, arguing that anti-abortion leaders in the state “abandoned Iowa women by failing to adopt basic protections.”
Neither Grassley nor Reynolds responded to requests for comment.
Action falls short of promises in Washington
Back in Washington, asked why Johnson hasn’t been pushing his Unborn Child Support Act forward, spokesperson Taylor Haulsee said the speaker still supports the legislation and pointed out that Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York – to whom he transferred the bill – reintroduced it earlier this year. The same day in January, the bill was referred to the House Ways & Means Committee. No action has been taken on it since.
A spokesperson for Tenney did not respond to an inquiry about the status of the bill.
Johnson is not the only member of Congress whose actions over the past two years haven’t matched the promises made in statements immediately after Dobbs.
The day Dobbs was decided, GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa said in a statement that she’d “work to ensure women have access to affordable contraceptives, quality maternal care, and provide support and increase awareness to adoption services.” But a month later, she voted against the Right to Contraception Act, which would have codified the right to birth control access. Miller-Meeks’ office did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Republican Rep. Young Kim of California also voted against that legislation. In the weeks after Dobbs, she said: “As a mother of four and to three daughters, I understand how important it is for women to have access to safe birth control, and I will work to support women on all levels.”
In July 2023, Kim joined Miller-Meeks in introducing another bill that would require the US Food and Drug Administration to send guidance to manufacturers on how to get oral contraceptives approved, arguing that this was the best way to both keep the medications safe and create a competitive market. That bill has gone nowhere, but in response to questions about why Kim voted against the Right to Contraception Act and what other efforts she was involved in, spokesperson Callie Strock said the congresswoman “has been working in good faith with the bill’s lead sponsor, the Energy and Commerce Committee, and House leadership to find a path forward to get this bill through the legislative process.”
Dave Schweikert, a seven-term congressman from Arizona, greeted Dobbs by tweeting that as someone “saved from an abortion,” he was pleased with the decision. The Republican often notes that his birth mother almost had an abortion before putting him up for adoption and that he grew up in part in the foster system and later adopted his children.
But in the two years since Dobbs, Schweikert has neither signed on as a co-sponsor of a bipartisan adoption bill that remains pending nor successfully advanced other legislation that would address the consequences of Roe being overturned. Schweikert’s office did not return a request for comment on why he has not signed on or whether he is pursuing similar ends through other efforts.
In the narrowly divided Senate, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney has introduced several bills aimed at boosting help for children, including one to turn tax credits into a monthly cash benefit for families. Fellow Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has introduced his own child tax credit legislation. Neither has gone anywhere, nor have other measures, even as several proposed versions of a national abortion ban have gathered support among Republicans in Congress.
Brahm, who pulled together the “Building a Post-Roe Future” coalition, said most of the bills he has seen are “window dressing” that don’t do nearly enough to make mothers feel like they would have the resources if they carried pregnancies to term – or to provide for them once those babies arrive. Brahm said he has been dismayed by how often debates have gotten tangled in accusations that mothers may try to game the system through unlikely scenarios such as alternating their years of work to claim bigger tax credits.
“Can we stop nitpicking and fighting about the people who need the help the most at the time they need it the most?” Brahm said. “The decisions that some of them are making do not demonstrate they actually have compassion for these people. If they do have compassion for these people, they should do a better job showing it.”