Raising children isn’t easy — especially during their first year of life.
To provide more new families the resources they need to support their newborn children, advocates from New Mexico’s arm of the nonprofit Save the Children Action Network are meeting in Washington, D.C., this week to push lawmakers into supporting a federal proposal to expand a pilot program designed to provide essential supplies for kids’ health and mothers’ recovery from childbirth.
The pilot program is known as the Newborn Essentials Support Toolkits — or NEST — Initiative. It provides new mothers and their babies with a number of essential supplies, including diapers, wipes, postpartum pads, breastfeeding supplies and educational literature for postpartum depression.
In New Mexico, where roughly 1,000 families have been served since the program’s launch in 2023, the kits have especially helped new families in rural areas who might otherwise not have access to essential supplies and other resources for newborn children, advocate Valeria Holloway said in an interview.
“It just really helps give essential supplies to the mom for the child,” she said. “… Because our state is mostly rural, it will definitely help the families just have that great start.”
The NEST Initiative, which was founded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, operates in 15 states, including New Mexico. Some 18,000 kits have been distributed throughout the initial phase of the pilot, the federal agency reported on its website.
U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, a Louisiana Republican who has spearheaded legislative efforts to fund the program, announced in February that President Donald Trump had approved $5 million to expand the pilot.
The care packages also help relieve the high cost of raising a child during their first year of life, which averages around $15,000, according to the nonprofit Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health.
“It does reduce the financial burden and ensure families have critical supplies immediately after birth,” Holloway said.
Despite the reported benefits of providing these one-time kits to families, progress on taking the pilot national has been slow.
A bipartisan measure to provide the kits nationwide was introduced in November. The bill would set aside up to $5 million per year from fiscal years 2026 through 2030 to fund projects providing newborn supply kits to more areas that need it. However, the measure has not yet progressed past the introduction stage of the legislative process.
Holloway was in the nation’s capital to rally support for the legislation, with the hopes of moving it forward.
New Mexico members of Congress offered mixed responses on whether they supported the legislation.
The office of U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury did not provide a comment in time for publication on the Democrat’s position on the measure. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez wrote in an emailed statement he agreed to co-sponsor the measure in recent days, and that he “proudly supports this legislation.”
Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández, also a Democrat, did not outwardly express support for the legislation in an emailed statement, though she noted she had already agreed to sponsor a separate measure known as the “Momnibus” that is broadly designed to curb maternal deaths.
“Every mother deserves the support she needs to bring a healthy baby into the world,” she wrote. “At a time when families are struggling with the rising cost of groceries, diapers, childcare, and healthcare, we should be making it easier — not harder — to raise a child.”
