Court Upholds State Plan to Cut Prenatal Care for Immigrants

In a legal victory for Gov. Pete Wilson’s aggressive implementation of new federal welfare guidelines banning benefits for illegal immigrants, a state appeals court Monday upheld the governor’s plan to cut off prenatal care for 70,000 illegal immigrant women on an emergency basis without public hearings.

The ruling by the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco may have little practical effect on the governor’s oft-thwarted attempts to cut prenatal care for illegal immigrants, since the state has already held public hearings on the matter and issued permanent regulations now scheduled to take effect Nov. 1.

But attorneys said the ruling could provide an important precedent as the Wilson administration proceeds with ambitious plans to deny illegal immigrants access to more than 200 other state services, from mental health care to fishing licenses.

Rules for these Proposition 187 like cutoffs--including a new residency verification system for everyone applying for state benefits--are not expected to be ready until next year, officials said. But the state could now have greater legal ammunition if authorities decide to use the kind of fast-track, emergency regulations that it sought to use with prenatal care.

Wilson lauded the ruling Monday as “a victory for common sense, the California taxpayer and the rule of law.”

Immigrant advocates condemned the decision and are weighing a possible appeal to the California Supreme Court. Two separate lawsuits--one in state court, the other in federal court--are still pending.

“Once these regulations go into effect, we’re going to see untold numbers of children being born with preventable birth defects, and that’s going to cost money to all California taxpayers,” said Robert Newman, an attorney with the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Los Angeles.

According to state officials, California’s annual tab for prenatal care for illegal immigrants is $83.7 million.

Wilson has not disputed the usefulness of prenatal care, but he said the state cannot afford it and has called the aid a “magnet” for illegal immigration.

Presiding Justice J. Clinton Peterson, who wrote the 3-0 ruling, found that Congress, in passing the new federal welfare law in August 1996, had decided that such assistance “furnishes an additional inducement to illegal immigration by pregnant women.”

Advocates say that undocumented women come here for better jobs or to be reunited with family members, not because of the availability of state-subsidized pregnancy care.

The appellate court reversed a ruling in November by Superior Court Judge William Cahill, who found that no emergency existed justifying the state’s plan to bypass the normal round of public comment periods that accompany new regulations.

But the appellate panel decided that the state was justified in implementing the new rules on an emergency basis because the normal regulatory process would have taken too long.

Last year’s welfare overhaul mandated that state and local governments end virtually all nonemergency public aid to “not qualified” immigrants--a group consisting mostly of illegal immigrants but including many with temporary legal status.

The federal statute contains no timetable for dropping illegal immigrants from the benefit rolls. No other state has moved as aggressively as California to comply with the ban.

Under the existing nonemergency regulations, the about 70,000 undocumented women now receiving state-subsidized prenatal care must be off the rolls by Dec. 1. New applicants will be unable to qualify as of Nov. 1.