My fellow Americans, the number of American babies who fail to survive their first birthdays, and the even greater number who suffer life-long injury due to the lack of proper prenatal care, is a national disgrace. We are still the most prosperous country in the world, and yet many nations with far fewer resouces have lower infant and maternal death rates. The current economic crisis, where job losses and local government budget problems have cut off the access of so many of our fellow citizens to proper health care, and certain recent incidents of domestic terrorism directed against women’s health providers, have made it not only important but essential that we assume our joint responsibilities as a community and do our best to ensure that every baby in America has the chance to be born healthy and wanted.
As a start towards ensuring a better outcome for our children, while supporting job growth within our communities, I am submitting the Healthy Babies Initiative to Congress. This bill will provide for the establishment and support of prenatal and neonatal health clinics in every state, with the goal of ensuring that no woman will need to risk her health or that of her child because she can’t afford proper care, or because such care is not available within her community. Small neighborhood clinics will be set up with gynecologists, physician assistants, midwives, doualas, and pediatricians to give every woman in America access to information on general health care, birth control, infant health, and reproductive services. Counseling will be provided for pregnant women without sufficient social networks, those who need extra support to carry healthy infants to term and make the best choices for themselves and their newborns, including adoption services when necessary. Counseling will also be provided, and networked with shelters, to enable women threatened by violent partners or family members to escape the cycle of forced pregnancies and maternal and child abuse. Post-natal services, including well-baby care, new-mother training, and vaccinations will be provided for infants under 18 months of age. This will also help identify infants with physical or other deficits, and ensure that the early intervention so essential for the best possible outcome — for example in babies with Downs syndrome, or those born deaf, or autistic — can be started in a timely fashion, so that every baby is given the chance to achieve his or her fullest potential as a future member of the American community.
Larger reproductive health clinics will be set up to provide a full range of medical services to American women of all ages and needs. These clinics will provide more sophisticated prenatal and reproductive services, including fertility treatments and genetic counseling, ultrasounds and sonograms, sophisticated prenatal surgeries and support for problem pregnancies, medically necessary late-pregnancy terminations, as well as maternal, perinatal, and neonatal intensive care units. They will also train the next generation of American doctors, physician assistants, nurses, midwives and counselors to provide the full range of essential services — birth control education, including abstinence; the proper use of contraceptives and after-the-act pregnancy preventatives; proper treatment of rape victims and evidence collection for rape cases; women’s reproductive health, including mammograms and pap smears; the expanding range of infertility options available to those who desperately wish for healthy children, including adoption resources; safe and legal pregnancy terminations when necessary; and a level of childbirth care and newborn health provisions commensurate with the gifts of our great nation.
All these services will be paid for on a sliding scale, with full financial support for those women and their children who would otherwise be denied access to care. But we intend to provide a level of care such that every American woman, whatever her income, will know about all the options available for her and her baby.
Since, unfortunately, a very small number of misguided individuals have misinterpretated the guidelines of our great religious teachers as sanctioning coercion, violence, and murder in order to restrict others’ medical decisions, all of these clinics, large or small, will be provided with full security protection through both local and federal authorities. Funding for such security will be considered part of future federal job creation and support programs. Anyone considering any form of illegal activity directed at these clinics, the service providers who will staff the clinics, the women and their families using these clinics, or the businesses and homes in the vicinity of these clinics, should be aware that such activity will be treated as domestic terrorism and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Where necessary, the human resources required to protect every American woman’s access to reproductive care will be drawn from our enormous pool of highly trained federal agents. This may, at some point in the future, require shifting some funding from the resources currently being used to monitor those forms of widespread surveillance deemed least cost-effective by Homeland Security, or even some reconsideration of penalties and enforcement concerning individual possession or use of those drugs, such as marijuana, now categorized at the lowest levels of potential misuse. But we are too great a nation not to seize this moment and start working towards the great goal of ensuring that every American baby be given the best chance to be born healthy, safe, and wanted. Thank you all, and God bless America.
AhabTRuler
Welfare starts at the moment of conception!
Cain
But. but.. I don’t want to pay for this with my tax dollars? Just a bunch of welfare queens with a handout. What do you mean it’s about babies? Fuck that. I got mine. Oh yeah, I’m pro-life btw so don’t be aborting any of those kids!
cain
Fern
I take it you’ve been thinking about this for some time?
Jeff Berardi
@Cain
Goddamned freeloading babies! It’s time these lazy good-for-nothing infants started pulling their own weight around here. Why, most of them can’t even speak the language! Next thing you know you’ll be automatically granting them citizenship. Well enough I say…
Ned R.
Sorry, I only skimmed this, I was busy making this delicious Irish stew. (Don’t ask about the secret ingredient.)
Ruemara
@Ned R.:
Real Irishmen?
MNPundit
Talk about something besides kids, would you?
lovethebomb
too much front page vag
no condoms, abstinence only
Fulcanelli
Ambitious, comprehensive, thoughtful, and much needed but it’ll never fly. It’s too French.
What we need is a pandemic that only affects the rich, then we take their stuff.
Comrade Kevin
@Ned R.: I don’t think that is your real name, Mr. Swift.
burnspbesq
“I wanna know
Which way do I go
To get to your America”
Quite a vision you’ve got there. Wish I could convince myself there is even a remote chance it will become reality in any of our lifetimes.
slackerjax
awesome idea, comprehensively detailed. someone needs to get some congresscritters in on this immediately.
Mike G
This makes so much sense that it’ll be a frosty friggin’ day in hell before any Repigs or Blue Dogs vote for it.
Everyone knows taxpayer money must be spent wisely, like another $100 billion for the neocons’ pissing-contest occupation of Iraq.
El Cid
Wouldn’t it be better being called the Babies Babies Babies They’re So Cute Jesus Is Smiling at Us Babies With Cute Baby Eyes and Widdle Baby Hands & Feet Initiative?
Fulcanelli
AL’s program could be Nationally funded simply by taxing hedge fund investor profits like a salary and eliminating Corporate off-shore tax evasion, but we’d need to import a lot more torches and pitchforks from China.
Ned R.
@Comrade Kevin:
How dare you doubt, sir. Anyway have you met my friend Celia?
Comrade Kevin
@burnspbesq:
Living Colour?
Brachiator
@Fulcanelli:
OK. So that’s Day 1. What are you going to do on Day2?
A very well thought out proposal.
But one question is how much would it cost?
And another question is how would we pay for it?
Anne Laurie
Fern, I was in high school when Roe v. Wade was being debated. So I’m old enough to remember the ever-present low-level internal hum of terror that any completed act of heterosexual intercourse — willing or not — could condemn a woman to, at best, nine months of medical misery and a lifetime mommy job. As well as the brief golden interlude, post-Roe and pre-Reagan, when we feminists could convince ourselves that progress was being made and that someday, eventually, most women most of the time would have some say in deciding whether or not they’d become mothers.
Ned R, back in my Irish Catholic high school, I was told that certain wealthy Anglicans complained to Dr. Swift that his little essay encouraged immorality when he suggested that ‘one healthy young Irish buck’ would be enough to keep ‘as many as ten Irish women’ productively pregnant. Those are the people, the nuns said, who really drove poor Jonathan into the madhouse. And those who shoot doctors in defense of “life” are their natural heirs.
KG
Don’t we already have this, more or less, in the current system? I honestly don’t know, since I’m a single guy whose information regarding reproduction stops at condoms and the pill. But everything I’ve heard from friends and family regarding this sort of thing is that we’ve got it already. The problem is a lot of people don’t know about it, or can’t pay for it.
burnspbesq
@Comrade Kevin:
Indeedy. Play it loud.
Over at LGF, those fine upstanding citizens are decrying the fact that the locals in Berkeley have taken to picketing in front of John Yoo’s house one day a week.
People used to picket in front of Dr. George Tiller’s office.
It is to be noted that unlike Dr. George Tiller, John Yoo is still a living, breathing citizen of the planet. And is likely to remain so indefinitely.
And that is the fundamental difference between us and them.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
What we need is a pandemic that only affects the rich, then we take their stuff.
I believe they call it “guillotine fever”…
Anne Laurie
Duuuh, read the next-to-last sentence: We legalize marijuana. And then we tax it!
People who don’t want to legalize marijuana are mostly the same people who don’t want to pay taxes for national health care, so no further net loss of support. On the other hand, people who *do* want legalization don’t necessarily care about child welfare, so they’d be a net positive!
Fern
@Anne Laurie:
Sounds like you and I are roughly of an age.
Your ideas are really well thought out, comprehensive, practical, and in another country, potentially do-able.
I just do not understand the resistance in your country to anything that smacks of publicly-funded health care – I don’t mean the insurance industry etc, (reasons for their resistance is obvious), but ordinary people who get all in a lather about “socialism”.
Fern
@KG:
Well, services that people can’t afford are hardly better than no services at all.
Fern
Oops – used the dreaded S word.
KG
Fern – right, but what I’m saying is: we already have the infrastructure in place. What we need is to educate, supplement, and subsidize. A lot of Anne’s proposal strikes me as trying to reinvent the wheel.
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
I didn’t read “even some reconsideration of penalties and enforcement concerning individual possession or use of those drugs, such as marijuana” as calling for outright legalization.
OK. So what is the size of the marijuana market? One estimate:
Let’s round it up to an even $100 billion. Taxing newly formed ganja companies, and also individual packs or joints of marijuana cigarettes will get you some revenues, but perhaps not enough to pay for a significant chunk of health programs.
I don’t think that either of these propositions is necessarily true.
In any case, I don’t expect you to come up with the numbers for funding the system. I am just saying that questions of cost and funding have to be addressed as fully as your great description of possible services.
scarshapedstar
Sheesh, all this pork for women? That’s even more sexist than Sonia Sotomayor!!11
The Raven
Krawk!
asiangrrlMN
@The Raven: Very nice, Raven. I like the quote.
Anne Laurie, all I can say is, good luck with that. It ain’t ever going to happen.
Sorry. I’m pretty down right now, and I can’t sleep.
Edited to add: I should have said I agree with your proposal. It’s a crying shame that as a country we claim to value children, but really, we don’t.
Paul L.
Like the bogus 300,000 people die from obesity every year stat, scaremongers can’t let go of a bad statistic.
I expect the retort to be screams of racist to this fact from the CDC.
someguy
This is great. The only thing it’s missing is either government sponsored/operated daycare (to provide a competent level of care instead of the typical hack operation, when both parents are forced to work), or in lieu of that payments permitting a parent to stay home with the child, if they prefer to. There are far too many parents of young children who are forced to work, because this economy is set up to require two incomes in a household to raise children.
Lee
I stopped by to point out the same thing Paul L did.
It is really is impossible to compare infant mortality rates across countries since the standards of reporting are so drastically different.
One country does not report a live birth until 24 hours after birth. Which of course drastically reduces the infant mortality rate.
Persia
@asiangrrlMN: Not true. We value white children from ‘good families.’
DZ
@Paul L and Lee-
You guys have a point if we’re talking about Romania or some country like that. You are dead wrong if you want to compare the U.S against Canada, France, Germany or Japan. All of these countries have far more effective reporting systems than we do, and they all have healthier populations. Or is this like the old ‘France has higher unemployment than we do’ even though France counts everyone not working while we count maybe half?
guster
The Orange Counter Register is the authoritative source re. infant mortality?
If the link is right all countries don’t use the same reporting as the US (and apparently Switzerland is the Canada of the infant mortality debate). But according to those sources, many do. So the question becomes: how do we stand when measured against the ones who report the same way?
And re. the main post: I know I’m naive, but why is that so impossible to imagine a politician actually saying–and working toward?
slightly_peeved
Paul L.’s article, while using Switzerland as an example, neglects to mention that Switzerland adopted the WHO definition of Live Birth (as used in the US) in 1988: see Duc, Gabriel “The crucial role of definition in perinatal epidemiology”, Social and Preventative Medicine, Vol. 40, No. 6.
According to the EU statistics website, Eurostat, the definition of Live Birth used by most EU countries matches the WHO definition. The countries that make exceptions based on birth weight or gestation period are Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Finland (see here)
Therefore the European countries used in such comparisons work with the same definition of Live Births as the US, and the statistics are comparable.
Shinobi
A friend of mine is an OBGYN resident. She works in a free clinic, where they provide counseling and financial services to all pregnant women. (Who are, BTW, eligable for medicaid in many states.)
My boyfriend has been without health insurance for over a year which means his chronic condition (hypothyroid) has gone completely unmanaged. We have been unable to find a doctor that he could see without insurance and I cannot afford to buy him insurance out of pocket. (His unemployment ran out some time ago.)
There are no services available for him, or for me, to help us when we have no money and are sick and need care.
My point, I guess, Is that there already ARE services, many services, availablle for women who need pre-natal care. They may not be the best possible. However there are fewer services for people who are mostly healthy and poor.
I find placing so much focus on pregnant women frustrating, even as a woman myself. Women (and men) need health care ALL THE TIME, not just when the baby factories are about to pop one out.
jonas
Conservatives concerned about the cost of these welfare programs should consider a very successful alternative that was widespread in England and America in the early nineteenth century — the “Bring Your Child to Work Initiative”, as it was called, I believe. Starting about age four or five, parents were encouraged by their employers to bring their young children with them to work where they could be gainfully occupied with fun activities, such as changing small gear wheels on looms, carding wool, and stacking fulled bails of cloth. Mine owners in Wales even let some kids go way down into the tunnels and pull their very own little wagons of coal out, just like daddy! What fun! They earned a few pennies allowance for their piggy banks and mom and dad didn’t have to pay for costly daycare or other expenses. Sometimes the employer even gave them something to eat.
See? It doesn’t take a new government bureaucracy to take care of kids, just the benevolent innovation of our entrepreneurial leaders. When will people learn?
Notorious P.A.T.
Oh please.
demimondian
@Ruemara: Somebody hasn’t heard enough modest proposals, I think…
TenguPhule
Fixed.
The Forced-Birth assassination support network is big.
Xanthippas
I think I like our new blogger.
fleinn
Ok.. so I read through this well thought out, reasonably straight- forward philosophical justification for health- care. And while there’s something jarring about it in that I am not certain why Bolivia needs an introduction to limited state- managed health- care initiatives, I read through it and find it to be encouraging and doable.
But still, there’s something..
And then some comments downwards the author of this perfectly reasonable proposal reveals that she is a self- proclaimed die hard feminist, and has been so for decades.
Shouldn’t feminists hate men or something? Fight the oppressive male dominated society with violence, raise girls to be men and men to be women, and so on? No, suffragettes used to be much less reasonable than this, never mind run around stating common truths about pre- natal care, babies and raising children.
Very upsetting! Next, socialistic crazies will be arguing for deregulation, the beauty of free markets and the rise of small businesses. Conservatives will agitate for nationalising banks and car- companies. And libertarians will favour everything from the death- penalty to selective application of the rule of law. *laughs* Really, can you imagine such a thing.
jim
Given where US infant-mortality rates have gone (hint: up) in my lifetime, this “Crazy” HBI is very timely indeed.
*
Having a good smeck at “how will we pay for it” … try “how will we spend all the money saved in downstream (sometimes life-long) medical expenses, absenteeism, mental-health issues, etc. – & how best will we focus all the economic activity created by a large & ongoing high-skill/high-wage job-boom” instead.
Charity
We kind of do have these. It’s called Planned Parenthood. But no one can get inside because of the damn
protestorsdomestic terrorists.hamletta
I used to work in developmental pediatrics, and back in the ’80s, the RAND Corporation (not exactly a hotbed of librul-ism) found that investing in early childhood education was a damn good bargain.
My former colleagues did a paper for Pediatrics in which they concluded that for every dollar we spend on early childhood intervention we get seven (7) back, by delay of pregnancy, lower high-school dropout rates, less antisocial (criminal) behavior, etc.
Mick
@Ned R. – love the Tom Lehrer reference :D