Newly appointed Oregon Sen. Lisa Reynolds at her pediatrics clinic in Portland on Friday, Dec. 13, 2024. (Photo by Rian Dundon/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Oregon’s state Senate has a tradition of offering new members leadership responsibilities, but one new Democratic senator was given more than most.
Sen. Lisa Reynolds will lead a committee created for her.
Reynolds, a pediatrician, will chair the newly created Early Childhood and Behavioral Health Committee. In the last session, mental health issues were assigned to the Senate Health Care Committee and child welfare issues were discussed on the Human Services Committee. But after Reynolds, a former two-term House member, was appointed to fill a Portland Senate seat, Senate leaders felt they should take advantage of her expertise.
“I felt that given her acumen, skillset, talent and experience, both in the House and then professionally, that there was a place where she could really nest in and make a difference,” said Senate President Rob Wagner.
The committee gives Reynolds a perfect perch to continue her work from the House, where she served two terms and chaired the House Committee on Early Childhood and Human Services. It also sets her up for potential success in advancing initiatives designed to help mothers and babies in the perinatal and postpartum periods.
Reynolds didn’t expect to chair such a committee as a first-term senator. She told the Capital Chronicle she was “incredibly honored and moved” by the appointment which wasn’t even possible several months ago. In November, Reynolds won her third term in the House representing the Beaverton-based 34th District. But that election also opened up the Portland-based 17th Senate District, with Elizabeth Steiner, a family physician who had represented the district since 2012, elected treasurer.
State Senate jobs don’t open frequently, especially not in Portland. Each term is four years, rather than two in the House, giving senators more time to focus on policy. And they also have more influence, Reynolds said, with only 30 members compared with twice that in the House.
She pursued the opportunity and won the appointment with the endorsement of Multnomah and Washington County commissioners.
She’s now the only physician in the Legislature, with Steiner gone and another physician, Maxine Dexter, who represented Portland for two terms in the House, now representing Portland in Congress.
Reynolds applies her knowledge as a pediatrician and experience with patients to her legislative work, she said. She’s worked to pass gun safety legislation and sponsored the child tax credit that passed in 2023, and she has tried to get flavored tobacco banned, something she’s pursuing again this session with Senate Bill 702.
But her biggest focus this year will be Momnibus, a set of initiatives supporting pregnancy, maternal health and people and babies in their first year of life. She wants to give babies a good start in life to help protect them from problems later on.
“I would love to put child welfare out of business,” she said, “or at least really take a lot of their business away.”
Bills often require more than one session to pass, and it’s not clear she’ll be able to get all of the initiatives over the finish line this session. But she’s taking a six-month leave of absence from her work as a pediatrician in the Portland-based Children’s Clinic to try.
“I’m going to miss it. But it just felt like the right time to do it,” Reynolds said.
Chicago childhood
Reynolds grew up in a working class family of four kids in Chicago. Her father was a roofer, who worked in his own company until he was 80. Her mom was a maverick. She subscribed to Ms. Magazine, which discussed abortion, welfare and lesbianism. She dragged Reynolds to Equal Rights Amendment marches and took her children to farmworker camps to donate blankets and clothes.
And she believed in education.
“From a very early age, my mom said, ‘You’re going to college,’” Reynolds said.
Her mom set an example: After raising her kids, she returned to college and obtained a degree at 40, eventually becoming a college counselor.
College was cheaper back then but still too expensive for her dad to foot the bill — she and her siblings qualified for free lunches in high school. Reynolds landed a needs-based scholarship to the University of Chicago and obtained other aid to pay for her education.
Initially, she considered a degree in history but found the prospect of writing a long term paper daunting so she switched to science, something she had loved in high school. She found research tedious so latched on to pre-med.
She obtained a biology degree and then went to the University of California, Los Angeles. She was stunned by the poverty in parts of the city..
“L.A. was an eye opener for me just in terms of people living in tents,” Reynolds said. “And seeing soup lines and things like that.”
She and other medical students created a clinic in a new Salvation Army shelter, where they got hands-on experience working under the supervision of a teacher.
She expanded her horizon through her clinical rotations at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, about 130 miles to the Mexican border. Plenty of immigrants sought care at the county hospital, and they sometimes had unusual diseases. Many didn’t speak English, either, which spurred Reynolds to study Spanish and do a clinical rotation in Guatemala. Today, she speaks Spanish with about one-fifth of her patients.
In med school, she didn’t plan to pursue pediatrics. She wasn’t a “super kid” person growing up, always wanting kids around and babysitting. She figured she’d go into primary care.
“And then I did my pediatrics rotation,” she said, “and it just really, really clicked.”
Kids were fun to work with.
“I really enjoy interacting with the families, but the kids are just a blast. They’re so funny,” Reynolds said.
Influence of work, motherhood
Reynolds met her husband in med school. After graduation, they moved to Portland, inspired by a visit with one of Reynolds’ best childhood friends and UCLA classmates who ended up marrying Knute Buehler, a surgeon who served two terms in the state House and lost the 2018 gubernatorial election to former Democratic Gov. Kate Brown.
In Portland, Reynolds worked a year at what is now Randall Children’s Hospital and then switched to the Children’s Clinic, where she’s been ever since. She’s worked there nearly 30 years, treating teens who later brought their children to her. That’s given her a long-term perspective on the effect of childhood trauma on adulthood and the importance of giving babies a good foundation in life.
About a quarter of her patients are on Medicaid, and she’s cared for young foster children whose parents have an addiction. She said poverty and mental illness have a toxic affect on life but said child endangerment is the worst, especially when children are removed from the home.
“That’s a very tough rupture to come back from,” she said.
She’s also seen the effect of being an immigrant without legal residency has on families and has written to immigration authorities in favor of keeping families together in the U.S. when they’re facing health issues.
“It feels like a privilege,” Reynolds said, “the intimacies and vulnerabilities in these times in people’s lives, and I get to be a part of it. I learn something new every day.”
Being a mom also has influenced her professional life. She and her husband have two kids, now 24 and 26 and college graduates. She said she became more flexible as a physician after becoming a mom, realizing that often several possible solutions will work. And she felt enormous compassion for parents who struggle to make ends meet.
She said pediatrics has changed enormously over the past three decades, from a focus on vaccines and infections to concern about living conditions and family history. Part of Reynolds’ job involves taking stock of social needs and trauma and directing families toward help.
Worried about gun violence, she became involved in Moms Demand Action, a nonprofit focused on gun safety. That brought her to Salem, where she met lawmakers and learned how the system worked.
She discovered being a pediatrician gave her authority. She could talk about children and the risk of suicide and people would listen. She realized that she could use her voice to help improve the lives of people struggling.
“I wanted to take what I was seeing and really try to impact things on a bigger level,” she said.
In 2020, when her youngest graduated went off to college, she ran for the House and won.
In the Legislature, she’s kept kids front and center, said fellow Sen. Kate Lieber, D-Beaverton.
“She has such a great perspective around youth being a pediatrician,” Lieber said. “Every time we have conversations, she is there saying, ‘Yes but what about what about youth? What about the kids?’”
The session ahead
Reynolds and her colleagues began the 160-day session on Tuesday, with introductory committee meetings and discussions. The early childhood committee, which meets Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1 p.m., heard from state officials about the work of the Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care in preparation for discussion about her Momnibus and other bills.
Among the nearly two dozen bills now assigned to the committee, six are connected to ideas she’s been developing for a year, including through several video discussions with hundreds of government officials, community leaders, specialists and members of the public.
Senate Bill 690 is a Momnibus placeholder in the event Reynolds decides to package the proposals, and the others cover targeted areas like creating a perinatal unit in Oregon Health & Science University to support addiction treatment during pregnancy and postpartum (Senate Bill 691), creating a taskforce on improving and diversifying the perinatal workforce (Senate Bill 693) and increasing the Oregon Kid’s Credit and income limits (Senate Bill 694).
The aim of these bills is to reduce child poverty and approach problems upstream rather than spending money after the fact on crises. Preventive care is cheaper than dealing with chronic problems, economists and health professionals say.
But raising the child tax credit or creating a new perinatal unit would cost money — and there are a lot of competing interests this session. Gov. Tina Kotek is pressing for millions more to be spent on housing and homelessness, addiction, behavioral health and education and lawmakers gearing up to allocate millions for fixing roads and bridges and other transportation problems.
The latest economic forecast in November shows that lawmakers could have nearly $38 billion to spend over the next two-year budget cycle, which starts in July. But budget writers will face a lot of demands, Wagner, the Senate president said.
“I think it’s going to be sobering for people,” Wagner said. “There just isn’t enough to go around.”
Those who know Reynolds say she won’t give up.
“She looks so sweet and mild-mannered but she is absolutely fierce,” said Democratic Rep. Dacia Grayber of Portland. “I think people underestimate her sometimes. She’s this nice, mom and pediatrician, and she is all those things. But if she needs to, she will get right in there and fight for what she believes in.”
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