In Congress’ 236-year history, only 13 voting members have given birth while in office.
In the fight for better policies for mothers and families, Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.) has also had to fight to have her own voice heard on Capitol Hill.
Last October, five months pregnant with her second child, Pettersen proposed a change to the House Rules Committee for “a narrow exception to the prohibition on proxy voting” that would allow members of Congress to vote by proxy while on parental leave, a push begun by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) after giving birth to her first child in 2023. This would have ensured, Petterson said in a recent interview with Ms., that as a member of Congress “you’re able to have your voice, your constituents’ voices represented” during a critical time for your family and health.
Despite Republicans’ stated opposition to proxy voting, Pettersen and Luna scored a rare bipartisan win to move forward with the measure on April 1, representing an embarrassing defeat for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). In response, Johnson “adjourned the entire House for the rest of the week,” buying himself time to broker a deal to kill the effort that would have enabled remote voting for new moms in Congress.
It’s mind blowing just how hard it is to make very small changes in Congress, and the amount of people who fight for the status quo.
Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.)
Johnson leaned in to the Republican claim that proxy voting was unconstitutional, and elaborated that it would “reopen Pandora’s box,” doing “great violence to the institution.” When in effect during the pandemic, though, 80 percent of all House members voted by proxy, including, ironically, roughly 70 percent of the Republican plaintiffs in the McCarthy, et al. V. Pelosi et al. (2020) case, which argued that those very votes should be invalid.
Deploying further metaphor, Johnson called proxy voting for new parents a slippery slope, saying, “If you allow it for some situations, you’re ultimately going to have to allow it for all.” Calling himself “pro-family,” the speaker nonetheless demurred that the practice violated “more than two centuries of tradition and institution.”
In that tradition, the U.S. Congress as an institution excluded women from its ranks for well over a century and has been slow to make accommodations to be more inclusive once they arrived. It wasn’t until 1916 that the first woman was elected to Congress (Jeannette Rankin, R-Mont.). Since 1789, only 3 percent of total House members have been women; and in 2025 28.7 percent of House members are women. In its 236 year history, only 13 voting members have given birth while in office—Reps. Pettersen and Luna most recently.
It even “famously took until 2011 for female lawmakers”—there were 76 of them at the time—just “to get their own bathroom off the House floor.” And the quest for proxy voting for mothers like herself, Pettersen concedes, may have to wait until Democrats are in the majority again, though she is guardedly hopeful to be able to “come together on a solution before that.”
“It’s mind blowing just how hard it is to make very small changes in Congress, and the amount of people who fight for the status quo,” Pettersen observed.
In response to Johnson’s specter of the slippery slope, Petterson countered, “I think that you can put reasonable guardrails on this,” noting that there are some defensible reasons for accommodating measures. “While I was fighting for proxy voting, we had a colleague who was dying from cancer. There are a lot of challenges that people face because we’re human beings as well. If you’re sick, if your kid is sick, if you’re going through a medical issue, we should have the same parameters for having our voice represented.”
“It is unfathomable that in 2025 we have not modernized Congress,” Pettersen reflected after the speaker’s “unusually aggressive effort to squash” her proxy vote proposal. After all, she said, “This is the 21st century. We have a different workforce, different needs. It’s time that Congress adjusts and isn’t doing things the way that we have for almost 250 years, when we used to show up on a buggy and women weren’t even allowed to vote.”
“I think that most of the United States would agree, and people were shocked to learn, that I was unable to actually vote because I wasn’t able to get on a plane before, and that there were no accommodations made when I was close to my due date.”
Since giving birth, Pettersen flew in February with her then four-week-old son in order to vote on a critical budget bill and on several occasions since to advance the interests of mothers and children, by supporting the proxy voting measure and opposing House efforts to slash Medicaid—which she noted covers health care for almost 40 percent of all kids and pregnant women in the country—all with baby Sam in her arms.
Only about 7 percent of U.S. representatives in the House are mothers with minor children, making them “grossly underrepresented in Congress.” “We want people in government who understand what real Americans’ lives are like,” Congresswoman Katie Porter (D-Calif.) has said, because for “people out there raising young children… having that representative government does change how we think about policies.”
“We know that women take on more when it comes to childcare,” Pettersen pointed out. “We saw that that was the case during the pandemic, when people had lack of access to consistent childcare, and women were dropping out of the workforce at two times the rate of men. So, we know that these issues disproportionately impact women. And that’s why we need voices in Congress that are going to actually work to address the barriers that so many families, and especially women, face.”
Just as the Trump administration was casting about for policies to encourage American women to have more babies, floating motherhood medals and baby bonuses, Republicans in the House stymied the proxy vote measure which would have enabled mothers in Congress to represent the interests of their constituents, including mothers and families, highlighting pro-family hypocrisy.
“The biggest slap in the face was the $5,000 baby bonus, as if that was going to convince women to have babies,” said Pettersen. “We know so many people are choosing not to, because they can barely afford to get by already, let alone the costs of taking care of a child, and the significant costs that come early on in their lives with childcare and early childhood education.”
A frequently cited Brookings Institution study estimates the cost of raising a child from birth to age 17 at $310,000, with the biggest costs including housing, child care, education and healthcare—all before the costs of college are even considered. Giving birth alone in is estimated by KFF to cost an average of $19,000, with out-of-pocket costs closer to $3,000 for those fortunate enough to be covered by large employer health plans.
“If we weren’t so worried about the future of our country and everything else, people would feel more comfortable choosing to start a family, but definitely rising costs, housing and childcare” are paramount causes of hesitance for those who might be contemplating having kids, Pettersen said. In April 2024, the CDC reported a historic low in the US fertility rate. According to Fortune magazine, the economy has “shouldered most of the blame for declining fertility rates.”
“It’s a huge barrier for families just to stay in the workforce,” never mind choosing “to move forward with starting a family,” Pettersen said, relating that even in her own relatively privileged position, it can feel like “we’re barely able to make it with our two kids, and it would have been absolutely impossible if we would have had our kids earlier in our lives.”
“When you think about Congress, where you’re expected to live in two places”—in D.C. and in your district—and “somehow be able to manage financially to pay for these,” it is a challenge that is amplified for parents of young children.
“I think the barrier for regular people, for women, for people of color, to serve in Congress is, if you’re not wealthy, and incredibly well connected, how unlikely it is that you’re there, to begin with, let alone be able to continue to serve” and represent the best interests of others like you.
Pettersen has long been a champion of women in the workplace. As co-sponsor of the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act in the Colorado General Assembly she helped pass “one of the strongest equal pay laws in the country.” And her efforts to advance proxy voting for parents in Congress offered representatives the opportunity—as yet unrealized—“to lead by example and support working moms and parents—starting with their colleagues in office” with reasonable workplace accommodations and flexibility.
“I’m lucky to work with colleagues in Congress who are fighting for kids” and families, “fighting for the things that are going to make an impact in their everyday lives,” Pettersen continued. But there is something to be said of the valuable “perspective of those who are going through it right now, who know what it’s like today, versus decades ago.”
We also “have plenty that have no idea what so many people are facing today…their understanding of, whether it’s student loans and the cost of college tuition, access to childcare, the rising cost of housing. I mean, they have no clue. They’re not going through it themselves, and it is very different to have that individual experience.”
According to Jean Sinzdak, associate director at the Center for American Women and Politics, “many of the leaders of institutions like congress are older men who are not concerned about the trials of young parents and families. It doesn’t behove the leaders of these institutions to change because it’s not affecting them directly.”
The disconnect between the demographic make-up of Congress and the general U.S. population based on median age (57.5 versus 38.5 years), gender (71 versus 49.5 percent male), and financial status (more than 50 versus 18 percent millionaires) helps to explain a status quo bias for policies that disproportionately favor older, male, wealthy people and a reticence to adopt more broadly beneficial, accommodating and inclusive policies.
But so does the Republican majority in the House, which supports Trump administration policies that go further than merely maintaining the status quo and seek to turn back the clock on inclusion, representation and reproductive rights. Their vision of what “make America great again represents,” said Pettersen, “is going back to the 1950s.” Trump’s Mothers’ Day Proclamation shows their hand. It celebrates the “selfless service of every mother in America” and expresses the desire for “families across America to grow” and “enjoy the highest standard of living on Earth on a single income” (emphasis added). Promoting measures that support women’s full inclusion in the workplace and public life is not part of their playbook.
