The Department of Health and Human Services clarified its policy to include unborn children In (S–CHIP State Children’s Health Insurance Program) thus, prenatal care would be provided for the unborn babies of mothers who otherwise would not qualify for aid. The bill would allow these mothers to receive pre-natal care that they would otherwise be unable to get, and would help poor or uninsured women give birth to healthy babies and get the medical care both they and their unborn children need. It would help women with wanted pregnancies.
Rather than welcome this measure as a way to help poor women and their families, abortion advocates attacked it as:.
“a ploy to create new grounds for outlawing abortion”
Clarence Page, “Playing Politics with Prenatal Care,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 5, 2002
and:
a guerrilla attack on abortion rights”
(Bob Herbert of the New York Times)
and
“another way to undermine the rights of women.”
(Jocelyn Elders former Surgeon General)
Jefferson Morley, “Fetal Mistake: the Abortion-Rights Crowd Squanders a Victory,” Slate February 14, 2002
The pro-choice lobbyists defeated the bill and left poor women unable to get prenatal care- even for their wanted, planned pregnancies. It was more important that women be left without health insurance than that unborn babies be given any recognition under the law.
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