Savanah Hart is big.
She makes that point with the firmness of someone just about to be 4 years old, with all of her 35 pounds and blond topknot behind it. And while she's throwing her weight around, her mother offers another reason Savanah's a force to reckon with: "She actually likes vegetables a lot."
Look out for a 4-year-old wielding broccoli.
Savanah, her mother and her 18-month-old brother were addressing nutrition issues last week at the federal Women, Infants and Children program's Gateway office, in east Portland. WIC provides support and food vouchers for pregnant women and children in their first four years, and also does health checks and refers kids for medical and other services. The program keeps a particularly close watch on Savanah's brother, who began his life with a month in the hospital for heart surgery.
WIC's offerings include milk -- whole milk until the second birthday, low-fat afterward -- and fruits and vegetables. The package has been made more nutritionally minded recently, something Savanah's mother, Raeleene, considers a major plus. WIC also holds nutritional and parenting classes; as David Brown, who heads the Gateway Center, points out, "The best way to influence nutrition is to start early."
Studies have found that pregnant women on WIC are considerably less likely to deliver low-birthweight babies. Children on WIC have better health records, stronger vitamin and iron intake and fewer cases of anemia than similar kids who aren't. They're also more likely to have their immunizations kept up, and cost Medicaid less during their childhood.
For families with new and small children, WIC is as much a part of life as Big Bird. Just over half of U.S. infants spend time on WIC; for Oregon, it's around 45 percent. Among Oregon's pregnant women, 48 percent are on WIC; in rural parts of the state, it's more like 59 percent. To qualify, a family income must be less than 185 percent of the poverty level, but most families are below the poverty level itself.
In the Gateway offices, these days the appointment hours are always booked.
"A lot of families that had been working, had jobs, suddenly didn't have a job anymore," reports Brown. "We did have a lot of families come in that had never been on support before. We had a lot of first-time families that had never been on WIC before."
The crunch has been bumpy even for families still working. Raeleene Hart's husband saw his roofing earnings flatten, and now drives a truck.
In a tough economic time, WIC provides proven health and nutritional benefits to about half the country's infants and their families. Early signs suggest that the program's new nutritional approach makes it even stronger.
Naturally, the new House of Representatives wants to cut it.
HR1, the House's proposed budget to get us to Sept. 30, would cut WIC $752 million from last year's level. For the rest of fiscal 2011, WIC might hold up; lower food prices have left the program some reserves. But food prices are now rising.
If funding stays at the House's proposed level for the next year, calculates Zoe Neuberger, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C., "approximately half a million fewer women and very young children could receive WIC benefits and services" than last year.
Every Congress since 1997 has funded WIC to cover all eligible women, infants and children who apply. Next year, that might not be true.
Among the various curiosities of this policy, all underlined in high-calcium orange juice, is that next to cutting domestic spending, the new House's other priority has been fighting abortion. HR3, coming right after HR1, would ban tax deductibility for any health insurance plans that cover abortion. The House wants to end all federal contracts with Planned Parenthood, and just to be safe -- or rather, unsafe -- also wants to end all Title X low-income family planning assistance.
It's a coherent, if perhaps somewhat extreme, position. But it does raise another question:
If you're powerfully against abortion, but you also want to cut back on feeding pregnant women and infants, just what is it you're for?
There's a reason why, in the last 15 years, mostly Republican Congresses and mostly Republican administrations have supported full funding for the WIC program. Backing away from that policy would not be a small thing.
It would be, in Savanah Hart's favorite word, big.
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