Georgia lawmakers this year voted to double the amount of paid parental leave available for state workers, expanding to six weeks the amount of time new parents can take off after adopting or giving birth to a child.
During debate on the GOP-led legislation, state Sen. John Albers, a Republican from Roswell, made clear his reasons for supporting it: “This bill is a pro-family and pro-life bill.”
Republican lawmakers have pushed a variety of legislation they say is aimed at helping families, mothers and children since passing a restrictive abortion law in 2019. The law bans abortions once a medical professional can detect fetal cardiac activity, which is typically about six weeks into a pregnancy and before many know they are pregnant.
During the recently completed legislative session, lawmakers filed several bills that aimed to address aspects of maternal and infant health and support for children, families and new mothers. Some, such as legislation to amend the process of establishing new health facilities such as obstetrics and gynecological offices, navigated through the House and Senate and await Gov. Brian Kemp’s signature.
But despite GOP leaders’ intent to focus on those topics, their words only went so far: Many bills saw some traction but ultimately failed to make it across the finish line.
Those included a measure that would have ensured pregnant women receive “reasonable” accommodations in their workplaces and what would have been a substantial increase to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, commonly known as welfare, which provides monthly cash assistance to low-income families with children under 18.
Georgia’s abortion law, which was challenged in federal court, took effect in summer 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion.
Abortion providers and advocates are now challenging the law in state court. While a decision in that case is pending, Georgia’s abortion restrictions remain in place.
Efforts since 2019
Lawmakers built some benefits for new parents into the 2019 law, such as allowing parents to claim an embryo or fetus on their taxes or request child supportlike payment for costs from pregnancy and labor.
On the last day of this year’s legislative session, House Republicans introduced a resolution supporting access to in vitro fertilization in Georgia in response to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling determining that embryos have the same rights as children, throwing the IVF industry into uncertainty. Alabama’s Legislature later passed a law specifically shielding IVF professionals from criminal prosecution or civil liability.
Senate Democratic Caucus Chairwoman Elena Parent of Atlanta said many Republican lawmakers have cared about family planning issues, but it became more of a priority to get things done in 2019.
“After Georgia’s ... abortion ban went into effect, some Republicans realized that they were very exposed on attacks that they are pro-birth but not pro-life — meaning doing very little to help struggling families,” Parent said. “Partially in recognition of that, they have passed a few bills to try to make life a little easier for families, but big things remain undone.”
House Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, a Republican from Milton who sponsored the parental leave legislation, said the family support and maternal health measures are “unrelated” to the abortion statute and criticism from advocates and Democrats.
“They are a growing realization somewhat because of better data and information and a response to more women working as well as, certainly, an interest to support families,” she said.
There is no “magic” spell to solve the maternal health crisis, Jones said.
“You just keep chipping away at barriers and strengthening supports,” she said.
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
It’s not just a question of better data. Georgia has long ranked among the worst states in the nation for maternal mortality, and it is currently ranked in the bottom 10, according to a report from the nonprofit KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation.
In recent years, the Legislature approved bills that aim to improve the state’s maternal mortality rate. For example, the state extended the amount of time low-income Georgia mothers can receive benefits under Medicaid, the public health program that provides care to the poor and disabled, from two months to one year after the birth of a child.
Last year, Kemp pushed legislation that would allow low-income mothers to begin receiving Medicaid once they are pregnant.
He has also signed legislation to ban officers at county and state jails and prisons from shackling pregnant women and require medical examiners to do an autopsy and determine the cause of death when someone dies while pregnant or within the first year after giving birth.
This year’s budget would provide an expansion of support for pre-K, including an increase in salaries for teachers as well as more money for supplies, such as chairs and tables, inside the classroom, and extra funding to lower class sizes.
“Of anything this session, I’m most proud of this,” Jones said. “This will affect children and families all over the state with higher access and greater quality education.”
Claire Bartlett, executive director of the Georgia Life Alliance, said the steps the state has taken since 2019 are truly “pro-life.”
“We’ve been very pleased with taking the holistic pro-life approach,” she said. “The (Senate) Children and Families Committee, for example, has been putting together policy that is practical and not political, and those are the kinds of things we should be doing to improve Georgia in general.”
‘Whack-a-mole’
Democrats say most of the steps Republicans have taken, while appreciated, are small and piecemeal.
“It’s like the state is playing whack-a-mole,” said state Rep. Kim Schofield, an Atlanta Democrat. “So we say, ‘You know, you have a baby, but then you don’t have the resources, so we’ll piecemeal the resources.’ So it looks like we’re really doing something in the big picture, but the big picture is that we have to do better. You cannot just keep putting on Band-Aids and thinking and calling that success.”
Democrats have filed legislation that would guarantee the right to abortion in the state and expand Medicaid so that more Georgians would have health coverage. A last-minute attempt to include Medicaid expansion failed to pass out of committee.
Miriam Goodfriend, a lobbyist with nonprofit Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies of Georgia, said she was disappointed an expansion of Medicaid “never came to fruition,” but she said steps the state has taken are encouraging.
“The legislators are ready to lay the groundwork and continue these discussions,” Goodfriend said. “This is not square one and offers a new launching pad.”
‘We see you and we care’
This year, Republican lawmakers cast a wide net to address maternal health and family support, to mixed results.
State Rep. Lauren Daniel, a Locust Grove Republican who brought her infant strapped to her chest to the Capitol each day, sponsored a bill to create a commission to study maternal and infant health. She said it would “give us the ability to say to the women of Georgia that we hear you, we see you and we care.”
The measure passed on the last day of the legislative session.
In the Senate, Republican Bill Cowsert from Athens handled House Bill 1339, which would overhaul the process of opening new medical facilities, referred to as certificate of need, or CON. Cowsert pushed a provision that would allow health centers that specialize in perinatal care to open without going through the CON process, which requires new facilities to determine whether there are enough patients to establish new care.
“The Senate has been greatly concerned with maternal health care, and we have abysmal rates of maternal health in this state,” Cowsert said. “We want to do everything we can to provide health care to women, pregnant women, young children and infants for the health of our society.”
Meanwhile, a measure explicitly intended to create legal recourse of action for pregnant women to adjust their schedules or duties without employer objection was used instead as an opportunity to reinforce the state’s prohibition against abortion.
State Sen. Ed Setzler, a Republican from Acworth who sponsored the 2019 law, amended the proposal to say: “Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to allow an abortion that would otherwise be prohibited.”
Although protections for pregnant women didn’t pass, Jones said “the fact that you had one bill in the Senate and one in the House (last year) tells me it’s an ongoing concern.”
The bill would have created a way for women to sue their employers if they refused to accommodate their pregnancy, be it by allowing extra breaks or time off for doctor appointments. The federal government passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which went into effect in 2023 and mandated the same protections. Georgia’s law would have allowed plaintiffs to bring cases in the state.
During debate on it, Cowsert raised potential fallout from creating protections for pregnant women.
“You better hope you don’t have the unintended consequence of incentivizing (employers) to hire women that are not childbearing age if they have this exposure (to being sued) that they don’t otherwise have,” Cowsert said. “If they’ve got a choice of hiring a 23-year-old or 40-year-old, you better be careful (of unintended consequences).”
Advancements in science over the past few decades have led to viable pregnancies for many women who are well into their 40s and 50s.
The bill never reached the full Senate for a vote.
