Devastating Effects of Sequestration Cuts to Maternal and Child Health Programs and Research

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Mrs. MALONEY. I would like to congratulate my good friend and colleague Jan Schakowsky for her incredible leadership in this body and for organizing this Special Order that focuses on the impact of sequestration on women, children, and families. It's very important.

Just yesterday, Jan, there was a report that came out from the National Economic Council and the Council of Economic Advisers which said that if we go over this fiscal cliff--if we do sequestration--that it would cut consumer spending by $200 billion. So, by having a consensus on the budget and a financial plan that is fair and balanced going forward, it could be $200 billion in stimulus. On top of that stimulus, there would be business and market stimulus just by having some certainty in where we're going. Having an agreement that is fair and balanced is critical for the overall economy, but the impact on women and children and on some of our most vulnerable would be devastating. That's why your particular focus today in this Special Order is so important.

The United States currently ranks about 50th in the world in infant mortality. In Morocco, 1.8 infants under 1 year of age die for every 1,000 live births each year. In Japan, the number is 2.2. In the United States, to our shame, the number is six. From New Zealand to all other advanced countries around the world, they do much better than the United States in this most fundamental measure of health and well-being. The people who are most affected by this failure are not those who have been irresponsible--they are not slackers; they are not lazy. They are babies. They are mostly babies who have been born into poverty. This is a metric that we should feel morally bound to improve by leaps and bounds, but instead, we are about to make it worse for these babies if we don't act swiftly to prevent sequestration.

If this Congress does not act to prevent this country from plunging over the fiscal cliff under the terms of the sequestration provisions, the Women, Infants, and Children program will experience a savage cut of 8.2 percent--a reduction of over a half a billion dollars. The program, which is known as WIC for short, provides nutrition and breast-feeding education, healthy food, and improved health care to millions of low-income families and mothers and children. Nearly 735,000 participants would be cut from the program next year. These are not families who can just make up the difference by taking shorter vacations or by whipping out a little credit card. These are low-income families, and they would be permanently hurt.

In my home district of New York, these cuts would seriously threaten the ability to deliver critical services to mothers and babies, which are services that they need. It disproportionately affects low-income families.

Sequestration would devastate the title V Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant Program. This block grant currently serves over 7 million individuals in New York by supporting initiatives that promote health, that reduce economic disparities, and that combat infant mortality. Under the cruel consequences of sequestration, more than 5 million fewer families would be served.

Cuts under sequestration would mean that, in New York alone, over 1,000 fewer women would be screened for cancer, that 11,000 fewer children would be vaccinated, and that 1.1 million fewer women and children would be receiving health care. In New York right now, about 14,000 cases of breast cancer and over 914 cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed each and every year. Sequestration would cut more than $268,000 from the breast and cervical cancer screening program.

In this fragile economy, States simply cannot absorb these cuts without cutting vital services. New York, like every other State in this country, has its own extreme problems, and we are running our State now at a deficit, and we have to make that up in a year. Under our State constitution, we can't carry deficits, and you can't tell a baby to just go out and get a job.

Let's work together to protect these critical programs for women and children. It's time to change direction. It's time to acknowledge that elections matter, and it's time to listen to the American people. This bus, at great speed, is headed over a cliff, and it's time for the people in the majority, the people in the driver's seat here in the House, to take a turn and to change it.

What would happen if we went into sequestration and if the middle class tax cuts expired? That would mean an increase in taxes of $2,000, on average, against every middle class family in America. Failing to take action would slow the growth of our own real GDP by 1.4 percentage points in 2013, and this continued gridlock would throw the United States back into a recession and cause the jobless rate to go up.

Congress is going to be stuffing, I would say, a big, ugly lump of coal into the stockings of the American workers if we don't save this country from sequestration, and we know that those who would be hurt are those who are the most vulnerable. It was our great President, John F. Kennedy, who said, When you balance budgets, don't balance them on the backs of the poor. As to the programs that really serve the neediest and the most vulnerable--the children, the mothers, the retired women--this sequestration is going to hurt them the most. I would say nobody in their right mind would vote to do that.

The American people made their wishes clear in this last election. They supported President Obama, and they want this Congress to get going and to get the job done, but at the rate we're going, we're all going no place fast except over a cliff. As you pointed out, the impact of going over this cliff will be devastating to our overall economy but particularly to those who are the most vulnerable--our children and our mothers and our elderly women.

So I want to congratulate my colleague and partner in so many efforts for women, children, families, and for working Americans and, really, for getting a compromise, for getting a solution that will keep us from going over this fiscal cliff. I thank my distinguished colleague for organizing this.

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Mrs. MALONEY. Yes, yes. Here we are so wealthy, and yet we are 50th in the world in infant mortality.

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Mrs. MALONEY. Literally, literally, and we can't afford to do it. I would say it really is scandalous, absolutely scandalous.

We have to work together and prevent this from happening. Always, it's those parts of our society that can't afford a lobbyist, that don't have the money. Babies can't get jobs, and they can't hire lobbyists. So those programs that help poor children are going to be incredibly vulnerable with this sequestration. As I said, no one in their right mind would let this happen, yet the parties seem so far apart, and we don't seem to be getting the consensus that we need to make this happen. It's absolutely critical. Getting that consensus and not falling over that cliff is literally going to save lives, millions of lives.

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Mrs. MALONEY. I would say so. And providing the resources for WIC, which provides food literally for children, for babies and their mothers, this is a fundamental measure of health and well-being around the country, the birth of children and the health of their mothers; and yet we are doing so poorly in it. We are 50th in the world in infant mortality. That is not a statistic; that is a scandal.

Taking money away from the support of these young babies, these are not irresponsible people that aren't carrying their weight. These are not people that are slackers, like some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about some people. They're not lazy; they just happen to be born poor. And in the richest country in the world, we have to be there. As John F. Kennedy said, we cannot balance the budget on the backs of the poor. It's wrong.

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