I have cited here all the current demographics to illustrate the magnitude of poverty among children in America at the end of the millennium. It is not difficult to imagine how this poverty affects young children. Poverty leaves its marks in every part of a child's life. The experience of misery and hunger has particularly damaging effects in early childhood. First of all, children need adequate nutrition to grow up healthy and without developmental problems. The authors of the Scientific American (Feb'96) article, J. Larry Brown and Ernesto Pollitt, revealed through a lengthy study that malnutrition in preschool children not only promotes illness, retards intellectual and physical development, but also initiates interactive social processes that further diminish children's developmental capabilities. Even short periods of malnutrition can affect a child's behavior, cognitive development and future productivity. Hunger is devastating to children, and haunts them all through their lives.

The hard fact is that about 5.5 million of American children suffer from hunger and an additional 9.6 million are at constant risk of going hungry. Once poor families pay rent and bills, little or nothing is left for food. According to a recent study, 29 percent of all children here in Oregon are going hungry or are at risk. "There really are times when we are really hungry, and there is nothing to eat. Mostly I worry about my little sister getting enough food because she is going through a growth spurt," said Amy Rose, a 9-year-old girl from Milwaukee, OR, in an article published recently by The Oregonian (Oct.16,1996). According to the Rockefeller Foundation, the depth and breadth of poverty is such in the United States that there are more children suffering from hunger here than there are children in such countries as Angola, Somalia, Haiti, Zimbabwe, El Salvador, or Cambodia. Over the past decade, clinics around the U.S. have reported an alarming increase in the incidence of severe forms of malnutrition in some poverty-stricken areas where hunger is a harsh reality faced by millions of American families struggling to make ends meet, without success. By definition, families below the poverty line cannot feed their children and pay the rent. Food is what poor families scrimp and save on. You pay rent because you'll be evicted; you pay for your heat because it can be shut off; you pay for medical care or you might not get any and die; what is left is what you try to buy food with.

Who would argue that a child simply cannot start out right in life without protection against the risk of being born into the abject poverty of a family with grossly inadequate income. It's society's duty and responsibility to protect its children from suffering or death because of poverty. According to the Children's Defense Fund, every day an average of 2,660 children are born into poverty in America, and it is a hard fact that every 53 minutes an American child dies because of the effects of poverty. Indeed, more American children die each year from poverty than from traffic fatalities, and twice as many children die in this country from poverty than from cancer and heart disease combined. More than any other factor, poverty limits the capability of families, and begins harming the young children before they are even born... And poverty, of course, has especially serious consequences for infants and toddlers. Children born into poor families are more likely to be premature, to have low birth weight, to die within the first year of life, and, of course, to experience much more illnesses and all kinds of health-related problems. Poor children are more likely to die at every age and from every cause.

The United States of America is unique in its lack of provision for childbirth. In all other rich nations, pregnant women and newborn babies are treated with much more generosity and humanity. It is a large part of the reason why infant mortality rates are so much lower in France, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and in all other civilized countries than they are here in the United States. Today, in the modern world a nation's rate of infant mortality is like a barometer of its success and advancement in combating poverty, ignorance and disease. It is one of the clearest indications of the overall health and well-being. As a World Health Organization's report states, "Infant mortality is not a health problem. Infant mortality is a social problem with health consequences..." The infant mortality rate in the United States places it 25th in the world, behind all other developed countries. It may be added that in 1960 the U.S. ranked 9th in the world. Entire regions of this country and most large cities now have infant mortality rates unknown in civilized societies. An American baby born into poverty in the U.S. capital Washington, D.C., in the shadow of the White House, today is much more likely to die in the first year of life than even a baby born in North Korea...

The fact is that each day in the United States, an average of 96 newborn babies die. The National Commission on Children reported, for example, in 1993 that over the course of a single year almost 40,000 American babies died before their first birthday. Half of those deaths could have been avoided because they were the direct result of mothers receiving too little or no prenatal care at all. The health condition of mothers during pregnancy has a most serious consequences for children. Infant mortality in this country is also closely linked to the inadequacy of nutrition among many pregnant women. A study released in 1995 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention states that a survey of 21,583 mothers revealed that poverty is still a leading cause of infant mortality in the United States. Soaring infant mortality rates in poverty-stricken areas of this country show how deadly poverty can be.

It goes beyond my understanding but, as statistics show, more than one-third of pregnant women ( about 1.3 million each year) in the United States receive absolutely insufficient prenatal care, mainly due to financial barriers. Poor women do not receive the care they need because the U.S. health care system, unlike that of every other major industrial nation, does not provide universal basic coverage for all mothers and children. According to research carried out at New York's Alan Guttmacher Institute, 36 percent of pregnant women in the United States have no medical insurance coverage at the start of pregnancy and 15 percent are still not covered even at the time of delivery. Those women who receive only late or no prenatal care at all are twice as likely to give birth to premature, low-birth-weight babies, and these newborns are forty times more likely to die in the first month of life than normal-weight infants. As a case in point, over seven percent (7.3%) of all babies born in the U.S. in 1992 had a low birth weight, which is the single greatest cause of infant death and of major childhood disabilities. The number of low birth-weight babies in America increased by 6 percent nationwide between 1985 and 1992. Furthermore, each year an average of 400,000 babies in the United States are born too soon; 74% of infants deaths are due to premature births.