As Mother’s Day approached, a group of Republican senators, led by Alabama’s Katie Britt, tried to rally some support for a new legislative proposal called the “More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act” (or “MOMS Act”). As Axios reported late last week, the bill seemed rather predictable.
The bill would require states to apply child support obligations during pregnancy and would launch a website — Pregnancy.gov— with resources related to pregnancy, including information about adoption agencies, but not abortion clinics. It would also provide grants to anti-abortion non-profits that assist women through their pregnancies and after birth.
This is, to be sure, standard GOP fare. Republican officials tend to be uncomfortable with the idea that the party’s sole focus in this area is imposing abortion restrictions, and the MOMS Act appears designed to package familiar GOP measures on the issue.
The fact that these senators intend to extend grants to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” is part of the conservative agenda, and a reminder of why the legislation doesn’t have — and won’t have — any Democratic support in the chamber.
But a HuffPost report noted that the Pregnancy.gov provisions in the bill are drawing additional scrutiny because they allegedly raise the prospect of “a federal database storing information on pregnant people.”
It was against this backdrop that Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington joined with 10 other Senate Democratic women to denounce Britt’s bill, saying it would, among other things, “create a new government-run website to collect data on pregnant women and direct them to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.”
To be sure, Britt’s office has thoroughly rejected the idea that the legislation is designed to create some kind of “registry,” but the press release from the 11 Senate Democratic women added that under the Pregnancy.gov plan, the website would “encourage users to provide their contact information, ‘which the Secretary may use to conduct outreach via phone or email to follow up with users’ — meaning that pregnant women would be encouraged to provide data to a potential Trump administration and potentially allow a government bureaucrat to follow up with them about the status of their pregnancy.” The Democratic senators added, “Americans don’t want the government to track, intimidate, and coerce pregnant women into carrying their pregnancies to term no matter their circumstances. Yet, Senate Republicans want to mandate the creation of an online federal database where women will be encouraged to register their pregnancies with the government in order to push them toward anti-abortion propaganda and dangerous crisis pregnancy centers — this tells us exactly how Republicans will weaponize the whole of government to restrict a woman’s freedom to choose and force them to stay pregnant no matter what.” All of this comes on the heels of Donald Trump’s interview with Time magazine, in which reporter Eric Cortellessa asked, “Do you think states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban?” The presumptive GOP nominee responded, “I think they might do that.” Britt’s bill has 12 Republican co-sponsors. I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of the debate over its provisions.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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