The Governor’s Brave Stand on Birth Defects

Whatever happened to moderate Republicans? They used to be nice people. Dull perhaps, but definitely nice, always pausing to pet small animals and children. But these days they have lost their sense of humanity. Take California Gov. Pete Wilson, once a highly regarded Republican moderate, who now lives to deny fetal ultrasounds to pregnant women.

Last week, The Times reported that “the Wilson administration was jubilant” because a federal judge had ruled in favor of its petition arguing that the new federal welfare law allows the state to end prenatal care for 70,000 pregnant women who are undocumented immigrants. How did the Wilsonites express their jubilance? Were there toasts all around to the prospect of more underweight and brain-damaged babies?

The Times didn’t say, but the paper quoted a Wilson spokesman bragging that “this is a huge victory” that will permit California to implement Proposition 187. That proposition--passed by voters but stalled by a federal judge--bans illegal immigrants from access to taxpayer-supported services, from schools to medication. They already were denied welfare, Social Security and Medicare, although taxes are deducted from their wages.

The proposition was hypocritically constructed to cut the remaining meager benefits available to immigrant workers while avoiding sanctions against employers who hire them to work under the most abysmal conditions in homes, fields and factories. Pregnant illegal immigrants will still be welcomed in the burgeoning garment industry to hunch over sewing machines, sucking lint dust while the fetus inside sucks for life. But no health worker had dare give that women medical advice that might give the baby a fair shot at a healthy life--it’s against the law.

No sensible person denies the utility of prenatal care, which includes regular checkups, fetal monitoring and education for mothers concerning nutrition and the risks of drugs, alcohol and smoking while pregnant. Just why Wilson thinks California will benefit from more babies born to mothers who drink, smoke or take drugs is a mystery.

“We consider this to be extremely shortsighted public policy,” said Charlotte Newhart, chief administrative officer of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of California. There isn’t a health professional who would disagree.

An authoritative congressional study concluded that for every dollar spent on prenatal care, $10 is saved over the life of the child. Prenatal care is also highly cost effective compared with emergency services, which hospitals are required to deliver when the mother’s life is in danger or the baby is born prematurely. Since the newborn child will be a U.S. citizen eligible for Medicaid, the long-run costs to the taxpayers of stupidly ending prenatal care could prove staggering.

The governor’s response is that prenatal care is “an incentive for immigration,” the implication being that, cut off from prenatal care, illegal workers will promptly return home to Mexico, Thailand or China.

Of course Wilson expects nothing of the sort. He knows that undocumented workers will continue to come and stay here under the harshest of conditions as long as there are jobs for them. And he knows that his administration and the federal government have done next to nothing to crack down on employers who hire illegal workers. They knew about a Thai slave factory in El Monte for years and did nothing. Wilson’s biggest campaign contributions have come from the agricultural sector, which depends on undocumented workers, pregnant or otherwise, for a majority of its work force.

So they will stay, and work and be exploited, but pregnant women and their unborn, in fields and factories, will not be afforded the simplest of prenatal care, and Pete Wilson is jubilant. Perhaps he celebrated his victory by dining in a California restaurant where the food was picked, cleaned, prepared and served by people without proper legal papers--people who are no longer eligible for public health testing for, say, tuberculosis or hepatitis.

When will political leaders exhibit the common decency to thank the undocumented workers for their service instead of continuing to sacrifice their humanity for political gain? Wilson’s current attack on immigrants was made possible by the new federal welfare law, which enjoyed bipartisan support because it is an election year.

That Wilson was quick to exploit this opening in the law is the demagogic mark of the man. But the flawed federal welfare legislation that Wilson now relies on was pushed by Dole and signed by Clinton, and they all share in the blame.