Posts by Marian Wright Edelman
Can Children Get Congress To Protect Their Health?
Published November 04, 2009 @ 06:43AM PT
Marian Wright Edelman is a lifelong advocate for disadvantaged Americans and is the President of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF).
In 1931, Grace Abbott, the Chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, gave a speech about her long and frustrating workdays in our nation’s capital trying to advocate for children’s needs. She said she felt all alone standing with her baby carriage on the sidewalk watching a great traffic jam moving toward the Capitol where Congress sits.
She saw all kinds of vehicles including the tanks and trucks the Army put into the street; "the handsome limousines in which the Department of Commerce rides…the barouches in which the Department of State rides with such dignity…[and] the noisy patrols in which the Department of Justice officials sometimes appear." And so she stood on the sidewalk watching, "because the responsibility is mine and I must, I take a very firm hold on the handles of the baby carriage and I wheel it into the traffic."
And so must we parents and grandparents and child care providers and educators grab the handles of our baby strollers and the hand of our children and walk into the traffic headed for Congress. We must make them hear and respond to the urgent, but still too ignored, needs of our 8.1 million uninsured children. We must break through the political den of powerful special interests like the insurance and drug companies with their fleet of well paid lobbyists.
Today, the Children’s Defense Fund is organizing a Champions for Children’s Health Stroller Brigade in the nation’s Capitol to send an urgent and clear message to our political leaders that real health reform for children must be enacted this year. Children’s unmet health needs have been lost in the debate’s "big" issues. Unless we act now, millions of children could be worse, rather than better off, as a result of pending health reform legislation.
