Pregnant Students' Rights Act

Floor Speech

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Mrs. McBATH. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the deliberately misleading Pregnant Students' Rights Act.

It is unfortunately not a bill about protecting pregnant and parenting students or improving their outcomes in school at all. This legislation is just another poorly disguised attempt to further roll back the rights of women in this country and unduly pressure students into making serious healthcare decisions.

We should be considering legislation that will actually support pregnant and parenting students and has a real chance of being passed into law, like the Understanding Student Parent Outcomes Act of 2023, introduced by my colleague, Representative Deborah Ross, and me.

Instead of leveraging the very real needs of students and their children against the highly polarizing and personal topics of reproductive rights and abortion, we could be studying the issue and establishing best practices at the Department of Education to improve graduation rates and help pregnant and parenting Americans stay in school, practices like ensuring access to quality on-campus childcare and accommodations for breastfeeding.

Supporting pregnant and parenting students should be a bipartisan effort, but the bill that our colleagues have brought forth today does not seek to find commonsense, consensus solutions.

I look forward to working with my colleagues across the aisle at the appropriate time to ensure that every student is given the support that they need to finish their degree, improve their career, and finally move into that higher income level that they have been dreaming of and working so hard toward.

Mr. Speaker, I encourage all my colleagues to oppose this bill.

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