January 08, 2025 03:00 PM UTC

Pettersen Part of Proxy Voting Push for New Moms

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• by: Colorado Pols

Congresswoman Brittany Pettersen (D-Lakewood) is a few weeks away from becoming just the 14th woman to give birth while serving as a Member of Congress. Before that happens, she and a bipartisan group of colleagues are pushing for a common sense resolution that Republican leadership basically ignored in 2024.

As Punchbowl News explains:

A bipartisan group of House members will propose a measure on Thursday that would allow new parents to vote via proxy.

Reps. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.), Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) and Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) are the leaders of the effort…

…Last Congress, Luna tried to secure a commitment from Speaker Mike Johnson to schedule a vote on her proposal to extend proxy voting privileges to new mothers. But Johnson never agreed to Luna’s demands and the push went nowhere.

The House instituted proxy voting during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the policy was widely abused by members, and when Republicans won back the House, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy banned proxy voting in early 2023.

The resolution requests that new mothers serving in Congress be given a 12-week period in which they are allowed to cast votes by proxy. Luna attempted to convince Republican leaders to accept a 6-week proxy voting proposal in 2023 before she herself gave birth, but to no avail. As NBC News reported last January:

Not long before she gave birth to her first child in August [2023], first-term Rep. Anna Paulina Luna met with the House Republican leadership to ask how she should plan to cast votes on behalf of her constituents after her delivery.

“They told me that I couldn’t vote,” that House rules prohibited it, the Republican firebrand from Florida recalled in an interview with NBC News. Although she is the 12th woman to give birth while serving in Congress, the House has no guidance for members postpartum.

Matters only got worse after Luna developed high blood pressure right before giving birth, a potentially fatal condition known as pre-eclampsia that affects some pregnant women, and continued to struggle after her delivery. In her first weeks of motherhood, as her fellow lawmakers voted to avoid a government shutdown and to oust then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Luna also developed mastitis, an infection common among women who are nursing, and her doctors advised her not to travel back to Washington.

There’s no common sense reason as to why the House of Representatives should not allow new mothers to cast votes by proxy; it’s better for the health of the mother and child, and it allows the Member’s constituents to continue to be represented effectively in Congress. As California Democrat Sara Jacobs explained in 2024:

“I’ll be honest, this institution was designed by old men for old men. And there really isn’t anything in place to help support so many of us younger members. And I think it’s important that we have more young people, that we have more parents who are in office because we just have different issues we’re dealing with, and we need to make sure that Congress is addressing those issues, as well.”

Thursday would be a good chance for Republican leaders in the House to prove that being “Pro Life” still applies for them after the birth of a child. As Rep. Luna told NBC News, it would be “hypocritical” for colleagues to oppose this idea given the GOP’s claim to promote family values and motherhood.

Of course, hypocrisy is more of a feature than a bug for Republicans these days. Hopefully wiser heads will nonetheless prevail on this particular issue.