APP - "The Doctor Who Made a Revolution"

[tekkychick]

Fascinating article about Sara Josephine Baker, a doctor and a NY public health official, whose efforts resulted in a HUGE reduction in infant deaths.

It's long, but worth reading.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/doctor-who-made-revolution/?pagination=false

But there are a couple things toward the end I want to highlight (bolding mine):

Civil rights legislation and new programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start helped many people, both black and white, but they could not shield children from the steadily worsening poverty of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1971, a group of Washington officials and their allies in the civil rights movement drafted the Comprehensive Child Care and Development Act, which would have created a nationwide system of high-quality day-care, preschool, and home-visiting programs that resembled the national system of child health programs envisioned by Baker and other reformers fifty years earlier. It passed both houses of Congress with strong bipartisan support, but right-wing Republicans, using language similar to that used to quash the mother and baby care programs, pressured President Nixon to veto it.7

During the 1970s, David Olds, now a professor of pediatric psychiatry at the University of Colorado, was working in a Baltimore day-care center for preschoolers. Many of the children came from homes wracked by poverty, drug abuse, domestic violence, and other problems. Realizing that there was only so much the center could do to help them, he eventually went on to create the Nurse Family Partnership, a home-visiting program in which trained nurses taught poor mothers how to provide a safe, secure, stimulating environment for their children, and helped them envision a better future for themselves.

Twenty years later, Olds found that the children of mothers who received the visits were not only healthier but were also less likely to have been abused or neglected and more likely to finish school, get jobs, and stay out of jail than a similar group of children whose mothers had not received the visits. Economists now estimate that every dollar invested in high-quality home-visiting, day-care, and preschool programs results in $7 in savings on welfare payments, health care costs, substance abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better-paying jobs.9

It turns out that there is one group of Americans that receives high-quality government-subsidized child-care services, including day care, preschool, home-visiting programs, and health care: the US military. Unlike the Soviet version, these comprehensive programs aren’t designed to create obedient little soldiers. Instead, they use a play-oriented approach to help bring out children’s individual cognitive and social capacity. This may help explain why military children score higher on reading and mathematics tests than public school children, and why the black/white achievement gap is much lower in military families than it is in the general population.10 Since the military child-care program was created in 1989, the government has repeatedly declined requests to fund an in-depth evaluation, perhaps because if the effects were known, all Americans would demand these programs for their children too.

 

[Cancel 2016.11]

I would like to read the entire article but I"m too tired now, I bookmarked it to read tomorrow. It's always amazed me how conservatives will go to any extreme to save a fetus, but won't part with a nickel to nurture, feed, or educate a child.

 

[Mott the Hoople]

I would like to read the entire article but I"m too tired now, I bookmarked it to read tomorrow. It's always amazed me how conservatives will go to any extreme to save a fetus, but won't part with a nickel to nurture, feed, or educate a child.

I've always found it ironic that almost all the so called "pro life" people I know are for the death penalty.

 

[Mott the Hoople]

It also reminds me of the old George Carlin joke "Have you ever noticed that the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't want to fuck anyways?"

 

[evince]

there is a reason why the right doesn't want the things based on fact to happen.


they don't have the same goals as most Americans.

they want to weaken this country until Grover can kill it outright.