"Health and Happy?" (Editorial, Feb. 4) Try stealthy and crappy.
There are other ways to increase funding and access for pre-natal care without furthering an anti-choice agenda. Updating legislation to extend coverage under the Children's Health Insurance Program to pregnant women or waivers to the existing rules are more legitimate public policy proposals.
It is foolish and naive to believe that the notion of "personhood" is being revisited here for the sake of quickly revising policy to deliver these services to women in need. Have no doubt that since the inception of Roe v. Wade, anti-choice forces have been working to overturn a woman's right to make reproductive choices.
"Pro-life" may be the greatest misnomer of our lifetime. Creating legislation to restrict access to contraception and not providing federal funds to implement a sex education curriculum that would encompass abstinence as well as proper contraception practices is counterproductive. If those that identify as "pro-life" spent as much time working to prevent pregnancy as they do to prevent abortion, the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country would fall drastically.
Providing pre-natal care to women that can not afford it privately is great public policy.
I ask, who is against pre-natal care? But the packaging here is not accidental.
In a recent New York Times editorial, Lynn Paltrow, director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, questions the lopsided nature of this policy:
"This maneuver to create insurance for unborn children both personifies the fetus and accentuates the fact that women themselves are neither full persons under the law, nor valued enough to be funded themselves."
