Thursday January 31 6:17 PM ET
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a move that worried abortion-rights supporters, the U.S. government said Thursday it was proposing a rule that defines an unborn fetus as a child, saying it was meant to allow public money to be used to provide prenatal care for women.
Both anti-abortion groups and groups supporting abortion rights said the proposed change in the State Children's Insurance Health Program (SCHIP), which would call a child a child from the moment of conception, would effectively give the unborn fetus a new legal status.
``The provision would enable states to make immediate use of the extensive funding already available under SCHIP to provide prenatal care for more low-income pregnant women and their babies,'' the Health and Human Services (HHS) department said in a statement.
``The proposed regulation, to be published in the Federal Register in the coming weeks, would clarify the definition of 'child' under the SCHIP program,'' it added.
``At present, SCHIP allows states to provide health care coverage to targeted low-income children under age 19. ... The new regulation would clarify that states may include coverage for children from conception to age 19.''
Abortion-rights groups have feared that President Bush, who opposes abortion in most cases, could seek to erode abortion rights, and they worried that elevating the legal status of the fetus could make it easier to outlaw abortion.
HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson denied the purpose of the rule change was to redefine the legal status of an unborn baby.
``I said what we are going to do is provide prenatal care,'' Thompson told a news conference. ``What we are going to do is take care of poor women, to be able to provide prenatal care. How anybody can try and turn this into a pro-choice, pro-abortion argument I don't understand.''
FUELS DEBATE
But both sides of the debate did.
``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,'' Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, said in a statement.
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 v Wade (the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalized abortion) and suggests that women's health interests can be overridden by elevating the status of the fetus,'' she added.
``And it turns the whole idea of prenatal health care on its head because prenatal health care is about the mother as well as the fetus.''
Regan said current law already allowed states to apply to use the SCHIP insurance program to provide prenatal care.
No one argues that prenatal care is a bad thing. Women who get proper prenatal care are much more likely to give birth to healthy babies.
Earlier on Thursday the National Center for Health Statistics reported 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. CHIPS 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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