Protecting Moms and Babies Against Climate Change Act

Key Points

• The bill creates a $100 million grant program to protect pregnant people, new mothers, and children under 3 from climate change risks like extreme heat, air pollution, and severe weather events. Grants would go to 10 local consortiums of community organizations serving high-risk counties.
• Grant recipients could use the money to provide direct help to families, including air conditioning units, home weatherization, air filtration systems, direct financial assistance, transportation to cooling shelters, evacuation help, and mental health counseling after extreme weather events.
• A separate $5 million grant program would train health professionals at medical schools, nursing schools, and midwifery programs to identify climate-related health risks for pregnant patients and counsel them on how to stay safe. Training would also cover implicit and explicit bias.
• The bill directs NIH to create a new research consortium focused on how climate change affects pregnancy outcomes, with special attention to racial and ethnic disparities. The group would coordinate research across multiple NIH institutes and set priorities for future studies.
• The CDC would develop a strategy to identify and map geographic areas where pregnant people and babies face the highest combined risk from climate change and other social factors like poverty, lack of health insurance, and limited access to healthcare providers.
• Closing racial and ethnic health gaps is a central goal throughout the bill. Grant applicants must describe how they will address disparities in both maternal health outcomes and climate-related exposure, and priority funding goes to areas with high maternal mortality and pollution levels.