USCCB supports expanding health insurance to unborn

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February 2002

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USCCB supports expanding health insurance to unborn

USCCB supports expanding health insurance to unborn
The spokeswoman for the Catholic Bishops' Pro-Life Secretariat hailed the announcement today by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that states will be allowed to provide health care insurance to low-income pregnant women for their unborn children under the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

"This is a good decision that will protect the health of mothers and children," said Cathleen Cleaver, Esq. "We're very pleased that the new HHS guidelines recognize that health care for children must start before birth. "SCHIP was designed to provide health care coverage to low-income children. To deny certain children assistance until they are born is a form of discrimination that should not be countenanced."

"Every pregnant woman knows the importance of prenatal care for herself and her baby," Ms. Cleaver said. "Allowing states to provide health coverage to low-income pregnant women and their developing children is the only wise and compassionate approach."

"Unfortunately, some abortion rights groups oppose this important initiative," she continued. "But their opposition is seriously misguided. Denying low-income women access to state insured prenatal care in the name of abortion is senseless. This announcement should be welcomed by all who are concerned for women's health."

Supporters of abortion rights have attacked the Bush administration decision to extend health coverage to fetuses, arguing that existing regulations already allowed prenatal care to be provided to women and charging that the move represents a first effort in a long-term Bush administration strategy aimed at undermining Roe vs. Wade (the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalized abortion) by establishing the "personhood' of the fetus.

Commenting on the new regualtions, Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, said in a statement: "We applaud this Bush Administration proposal to recognize the existence of an unborn child in order to allow the baby, and the mother as well, to receive adequate pre-natal care— a concept to which only the most extreme pro-abortion ideologues will object,"

But Regan Ralph, vice president for health at the National Women's Law Center, called it "bad news."

"It looks like cynical politics," she said, accusing the Bush administration of using the rule as a way of effectively giving unborn babies a legal status they currently do not have, and thus attacking abortion rights.

"It obviously undermines the principle of Roe vs. Wade and suggests that women's health interests can be overridden by elevating the status of the fetus . . . prenatal health care is about the mother as well as the fetus."

The National Center for Health Statistics reports that the U.S. infant mortality rate fell by 3 percent from 1998 to 1999, in part due to more women getting prenatal care. HHS estimates that 10.9 million women of child-bearing age do not have health insurance. SCHIP is a program aimed at filling that gap for children, as most people in the U.S. get health insurance through their employers.

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