Administration pretends to give medical help to poor women and children

Feb 4, 2002

The Bush administration announced that it was moving to make more low income women eligible for pre-natal and child health care.

The government proposes to expand coverage by defining a fetus as having legal status, so that it could “qualify” for health coverage.

Concerned about the health and well being of pregnant women and their unborn or newly born children – do they actually dare to say this? Then all the Administration has to do is provide the money for their medical care. It could start by rescinding the cuts in Medicaid made by this Administration and earlier ones. It could begin to call employers to account for cutting back on health care coverage.

This administration, like the previous ones, presides over a country with more than 40 million uninsured people, a huge percentage of which are the working poor, the vast majority of which are women and children. So of course, poor women lack pre-natal care and good health coverage for the birth or the lives of their children.

No this hypocrite Bush is not making a serious effort to cover health care for poor women, children and unborn children. He is simply trying to please the religious fundamentalists who are part of his political base of support. Giving a fetus legal rights is a backdoor attack on the right to a legal abortion, one of their causes.

Bush is not the first wealthy old man pretending to care about women and their babies. Lechers, willing to ignore each other’s own sexual attitudes and attacks on women, have long pretended to care about the “rights” of “unborn” children.

We see today what such “caring” has meant: a rate of infant mortality higher than that in any other industrialized country, comparable, in fact, to the rate of infant deaths in many “Third World” countries.

Hypocrites!