Republicans are busy thumping their chests over blocking a non-existent medical procedure using a bill that was intentionally written to mislead. If the goal was to terrify women and confuse physicians, they've succeeded. However, their concern for "life" is clear in the results of other legislation.

From 2002 on, every year has brought proposals of slashing health programs for the poor. By 2006, Medicaid was the largest single reduction in the budget. Even as the bill was being signed, there were predictions that the series of cuts would have an impact even larger than their considerable size. But Republicans, using their standard black-is-white logic, argued that the cuts would be good for those depending on Medicaid.

...in his State of the Union address last week, he did make this vow: "Our government has a responsibility to help provide health care for the poor and the elderly, and we are meeting that responsibility." Ironically, one of the ways Republican lawmakers say they're meeting that responsibility is by scaling back the Medicaid health program for the poor.

The targeting of Medicaid hasn't stopped. Bush's 2008 budget includes huge cuts to both Medicaid and Medicare. The cuts have drawn many warnings, since they directly targeted those who need help most.

[Public health expert Sara Rosenbaum] says that for children in particular, coverage has never contracted -- until now. "This is the first time in 40 years, that is since the program was enacted, that we actually have policy coming out of Congress that reduces Medicaid's commitment to the poorest children."

As the health data for the last few years begins to become available, the evidence shows that these cuts are bearing the awful fruit that even the most cursory analysis would have predicted. As detailed in Erik Eckholm's New York Times article, for the first time in over a decade, infant mortality rates are soaring, especially among the very population served by Medicaid.

To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate — defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births — fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4.

In Mississippi alone, that one year saw 65 more children die than the previous year. At 17 deaths per 1,000 births, the death rate among blacks in that state is now higher than it's been at any time since the Reagan administration -- another era of Medicaid cuts. That's worse than 83 countries. Worse than Tonga, and Sri Lanka, and Uruguay. Worse than Russia. While Republican legislators made excuses for their cuts, saying that they would give "more flexibility" to governors (like Republican Haley Barbour of Mississippi), the result is scenes like this one.

Jamekia Brown, 22 and two months pregnant with her third child, lives next to the black people’s cemetery in the part of town called No Name, where multiple generations crowd into cheap clapboard houses and trailers. So it took only a minute to walk to the graves of Ms. Brown’s first two children, marked with temporary metal signs because she cannot afford tombstones.

Mississippi isn't the only state to be affected by Medicaid cuts, and it's not the only state seeing this sad rise in infant mortality. However, there's a reason why that state was particularly hard hit. In Mississippi, Bush had an eager partner.

In 2004, Gov. Haley Barbour came to office promising not to raise taxes and to cut Medicaid... As a result, the number of non-elderly people, mainly children, covered by the Medicaid and CHIP programs declined by 54,000 in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years.

Want to know the truth about Republican "pro-life" positions? You can find it in the cemetery behind No Name.

Bush and Barbour delivered on lower taxes, but the price for putting more money in the pockets of the richest, is dead children for the poorest.

(Note: At least two diaries on this subject were previously posted. Please give them a read.)