[1] It was sponsored by Senator Morris Sheppard (D) of Texas and Representative Horace Mann Towner (R) of Iowa and signed by President Warren G. Harding on November 23, 1921.

[4] The act played an important role in the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, the decrease in infant mortality rates, and the expansion of federal welfare legislation in the twentieth century United States.

[5] The political and social organization and activism by women in the Progressive Era led to the establishment of the United States Children's Bureau in the Department of Labor.

The bureau was staffed and run largely by white women professionals with backgrounds in medicine, social science, and the settlement movement.

It was modeled after a similar bill presented in the previous session by Representative Jeannette Pickering Rankin (R-Montana) and sponsored by Julia Lathrop, head of the Children's Bureau.

[4] The Sheppard–Towner Act led to the creation of 3,000 child and maternal health care centers, many of these in rural areas, during the eight years it was in effect.

States that had recently extended suffrage to women, such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Alabama, tended to have higher participation levels in an effort to appeal to newly enfranchised voters.

States with a longer history of women's suffrage tended to be less involved in the program, including Idaho, Colorado, and Washington.

Public health workers' emphasis on pregnancy and childbirth as a medical process often led them to dismiss the folk traditions and knowledge of midwives, especially among African Americans in the South.

This shift was a necessary step in improving maternal and infant health, as many of these folk traditions were rooted in unscientific and ineffective practices that posed risks to both mothers and newborns.

Midwife licensure and associated Sheppard-Towner programs that encouraged reliance on medical professionals contributed to a significant–but not complete–decline in the practice of midwifery in the United States.

By 1930, midwife-attended childbirths dropped to 15% nationwide, while African-Americans in the South continued to rely heavily on midwives well into the mid-twentieth century.

[4] States that spent one standard deviation of money on "child-life", or approximately $27, reduced infant mortality on average by 2.8 deaths per 1000 live births.

States that spent one standard deviation of money on health and sanitation, or approximately $188, reduced infant mortality on average by 6.27 deaths per 1000 live births.

Sheppard-Towner set the framework for the inclusion of substantial provisions for maternal and infant care in the Social Security Act of 1935.