Sorry to be away, readers. I just arrived home from a week with my family, no tv, no radio, no phone service, just lovely woods and each other. I did have the opportunity to stop by a colleague's clinic for a tour and I'm all full of ideas that I want to implement at our facility. Just now opening up my email and starting to get plugged in again and it seems like I've missed quite a bit.



Just some initial thoughts on what I might do if I were a governor with a special needs child and a pregnant teenage daughter and I wanted to really support families and show respect for the sanctity of life...

Perhaps I would advocate for medical insurance for all pregnant women, regardless of ability to pay.

I could increase the compensation and training for foster families willing to parent special needs children (after all, they are the most vulnerable and require the most skilled caretakers) and start seriously trying to decrease the huge waiting list of special needs kids who are in need of adoption/fostering.



Maybe I would require that any teenage mother or father receive free or low-cost child care for as long as they are in high school or college.

I would revise the regulations around receiving public assistance so that teen mothers could work towards some level of financial self-sufficiency while still living at home. (Current regulations frequently add up the income of ALL adults in a household to establish eligibility.)

I would enhance my state's requirements for the family medical leave act, to ensure that the parents of an infant with special needs are able to extend their leave as long as the infant is in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Then again, I could slash the budget of one of the few residential facilities for teen parents in my state, refuse to support comprehensive sex ed and leave the mothers and fathers in my state to deal with these "situations" on their own. They are, after all, "private family matters."

-Nell