Friday, June 12, 2009
Legislature TNGOP, Your Budget Kills Babies
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 10:20 AM
Rachel Walden, from Women's Health News, just sent me an email about the baby-killing in the State Budget. As you know, the right-wing talking point over the past couple of days has been "We're not killing babies, we're just killing a study on infant mortality."
Well, we now know that to be untrue.
Walden serves on the Board of the Vanderbilt Center for Health Services (and I have served on the Board), which oversees the MIHOW program. The MIHOW program should be a program Conservatives can love. Local communities work in conjunction with the Center for Health Services to recognize and train local women who other women in the community already look to for advice in order to help these women help the women in their communities have healthy babies.
It sounds corny, I know. But their success rate speaks for itself. Women who are a part of MIHOW are much more likely to get early prenatal care, more likely to get adequate prenatal care, much more likely to have babies at healthy birth weights, bring those kids in for well baby check ups, and get health insurance.
Babies whose mothers participate in the MIHOW program have a better shot than the babies of other mothers in their communities of making it to their first birthdays.
And the new budget slashes state funding to MIHOW programs.
This isn't a study of infant mortality. This is folks on the ground doing the hard work to actually lower infant mortality. In a sane world we'd be talking about how to fund more programs like MIHOW. Instead, we're cutting funding, and that's going to have dire consequences for infant mortality in this state.
Well, we now know that to be untrue.
Walden serves on the Board of the Vanderbilt Center for Health Services (and I have served on the Board), which oversees the MIHOW program. The MIHOW program should be a program Conservatives can love. Local communities work in conjunction with the Center for Health Services to recognize and train local women who other women in the community already look to for advice in order to help these women help the women in their communities have healthy babies.
It sounds corny, I know. But their success rate speaks for itself. Women who are a part of MIHOW are much more likely to get early prenatal care, more likely to get adequate prenatal care, much more likely to have babies at healthy birth weights, bring those kids in for well baby check ups, and get health insurance.
Babies whose mothers participate in the MIHOW program have a better shot than the babies of other mothers in their communities of making it to their first birthdays.
And the new budget slashes state funding to MIHOW programs.
This isn't a study of infant mortality. This is folks on the ground doing the hard work to actually lower infant mortality. In a sane world we'd be talking about how to fund more programs like MIHOW. Instead, we're cutting funding, and that's going to have dire consequences for infant mortality in this state.
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