10 Beautiful Bills for a Better America

By: Chuck Donovan, originally published April 10, 2025, The Washington Stand

As Congress debates major issues regarding taxes, tariffs, and trade, it would be heartening for faith, family, and freedom Americans if it found time to pass topical bills that address other pressing concerns such as protecting unborn life, dismantling taxpayer-funded abortion, conscience protections, and more.

A number of these measures have been introduced in diverse forms in past Congresses indisposed to adopt them. Others are ideas whose time had not yet come. But in these still-early days of the 119th Congress, the two chambers of Congress, one of which had time for Senator Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) around-the-clock oration, might well find room on their schedules to debate measures that accommodate conscience, support mothers and families, and protect an underappreciated national responsibility — the collection and analysis of social metrics.

Here are 10 measures that fit this general description, with the acknowledgement that they are only a sample of proposals that are within striking distance of adoption and worthy of congressional attention even in a crowded calendar.

Hawley Child Tax Credit Expansion

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) champions an expansion of the child tax credit, a longtime bipartisan proposition, to $5,000 from its current value of $2,000 per child. The credit would reportedly be refundable against payroll taxes, be available during the year in which the child was conceived, and be paid out over the course of the year rather than remitted as a lump sum at tax time.

S. 4524, Lankford Conscience Protection Act of 2024

Reintroduced most recently in June 2024, legislation like this is urgently needed in an environment where existing federal conscience protections languished unenforced in the Biden years, and states like Illinois and Washington are moving to require physicians or pregnancy centers to refer for abortions against their convictions that these actions are morally and ethically wrong. S. 4524 would have reinforced several existing federal conscience laws and grant individuals and institutions a private right of action to assert their conscience claims in federal court. The proposed law would clarify that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must investigate alleged conscience violations and can suspend federal funds for health-related services if the violators do not respect conscience.

H.R. 796, Miller Second Chance for Moms Act

Introduced on January 28, 2025 by Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), this legislation would amend the basic federal food, drug, and cosmetics legislation to require the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to mandate a warning label be placed on the abortion drug mifepristone. The warning label would advise women of the availability of an abortion pill reversal (APR) protocol that can often rescue their baby after the woman has taken the drug. It would require the secretary of HHS to create or contract with a 24/7, toll-free hotline to advise women on how to access abortion pill reversal with referrals limited solely to providers of APR.

H.R. 7, Smith No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2025

Introduced on January 22, 2025, Rep. Christopher Smith’s (R-N.J.) bill is an expanded version of previous anti-funding measures and now has 81 House of Representatives co-sponsors. The bill would make permanent the terms of the Hyde Amendment, which permits funding of abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or where a physical disorder, injury, or illness would threaten a woman’s life. It would apply to the full sweep of Hyde Amendment provisions applicable now to annual spending bills. H.R. 7 would also bar federal subsidies for the portion of health insurance premiums that pay for abortion coverage.

H.R. 271 and 272, Fischbach Defund Planned Parenthood and Protecting Life and Taxpayers Acts

These measures, introduced on January 14, 2025, would prohibit Planned Parenthood from accessing any discretionary or mandatory federal funds because of its immersion in the provision and promotion of abortion. The Protecting Life Act would require all federally-funded entities to certify that they will not carry out abortions or provide funds to any other entity that carries out abortions beyond the terms permitted by the Hyde Amendment. The Senate version of the Defund Planned Parenthood Act, S. 203, was introduced on January 23, 2025 by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and has 11 co-sponsors. In addition, a coalition of 150 pro-life groups has called on Congress to cut funding for Planned Parenthood in the upcoming budget reconciliation bill.

S. 334, Risch American Values Act

This bill carries forward pro-life foreign assistance policy. Introduced on January 30, 2025 by Senator James Risch (R-Idaho), the bill would amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to ensure that no appropriated funds may be used to pay for abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to be sterilized. The bill would also bar the use of funds to pay for biomedical research related to techniques of induced abortion or coerced sterilization. The bill has a dozen co-sponsors.

H.R. 627/S. 178, Norman-Ernst Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2025

Introduced by Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) on the House side and Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in the Senate, this is a critical piece of legislation that will ensure the demographic and some health implications of induced abortion are tracked and analyzable to the extent possible in a national, public framework. The urgency of this legislation, which would redress a half century of voluntary and incomplete national reporting, is all the greater thanks to the rapid expansion of chemical abortion conducted with little to no medical evaluation or supervision. The bill notes the disturbing facts that not a single data point regarding abortion is publicly available for all 50 states, and that three states, constituting 15% of U.S. abortion volume, share no reports at all with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

H.R. 578, Roy FACE Act Repeal Act of 2025

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has led the fight against the much-abused Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a law that was weaponized during the Biden administration to target right-to-life demonstrators with vindictive prosecutions and harsh penalties. President Trump, as one of his initial executive actions, pardoned men and women, including grandmothers, who had been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for engaging in protests, while making little or no progress in identifying or prosecuting individuals who attacked churches and pregnancy help centers. Absent repeal of this legislation, Roy says, biased enforcement will promptly resume in a future administration. “Data my office obtained from Merrick Garland’s DOJ showed that 97% of FACE Act prosecutions from 1994-2024 were against pro-life Americans.”

H.R. 722, Burlison, Life at Conception Act

The United States has seen a recent spike in abortions, beginning before the 2022 Dobbs ruling but continuing in its wake, with one source reporting that our nation’s abortion toll has risen to more than one million abortions per year. As Congress and the states look for ways to support mothers, the fact remains that for much of the country, the legal status of the unborn is a void that must be filled. It is lawful in much of the land to dismember a child in the womb; to destroy a child in the third trimester or a human embryo because it is affected by Down syndrome or is not the preferred sex; to set aside a child born alive and deny him or her life-saving care; to use public funds to pay for and promote abortion; to leave a woman alone in a bathroom to expel the new life from her womb; or to ship abortion drugs across state lines with little or no medical support.

To address these wrongs, legislation is needed that not only delivers unprecedented levels of support for men and women to act for the good of their child, but to safeguard each and every innocent life. The Life at Conception Act, with 73 co-sponsors, faces a steep challenge in this Congress but it too would be a beautiful bill, one with the added virtue of honoring our best hope for a better future for America.

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024.