Could health-care reform help in terms of poor pregnant women getting care?
Yeah. I think that we should make prenatal care absolutely free to anybody who’s pregnant, no questions asked. A pregnant woman can not drink or smoke, but she can’t control the air and water. Towns and villages can certainly increase the degree to which they watch for contaminants in their water supply. We also have federal solutions. For instance, one problem is cleaning up the lead in the environment, especially in the soil. That’s a tremendously expensive thing to do, and it can only be done by the federal government. Right now, what disturbs me the most is that the EPA and the CDC don’t do enough in public service advertising on television and on billboards to get people to focus on what they can do personally to avoid contamination. Some people will say I’m just a fear-monger. But I don’t see how we can get a country of this size moving unless people get afraid.
