Cutoff of Prenatal Care for Illegal Immigrants Allowed

Gov. Pete Wilson scored a legal victory at the state Supreme Court on Wednesday when the justices decided not to hear a challenge to his aggressive plan for cutting off prenatal care benefits to illegal immigrants.

The ruling ends more than a year of litigation that followed Wilson’s attempt to order an emergency halt of prenatal care to about 70,000 illegal immigrant women, bypassing the public hearing process that is normally required with such a change.

During the court delay, state officials went ahead with the public hearings anyway and are now on schedule to end the benefits to new applicants next month and to existing recipients in January.

Wilson aides said, however, that the victory may be an important precedent next year, when the governor is planning to cut more than 200 other programs for illegal immigrants. Now, state authorities believe they have a green light to order the reductions on an emergency schedule.

“This once again defeats the efforts of a determined group of special interests who seek to continue taxpayer-funded services for illegal aliens,” Wilson said in a statement Wednesday. “We will now continue our efforts to implement the federal requirements to halt public benefits to illegal aliens, bolstered by today’s decision.”

Wilson has sought to cut prenatal care benefits to illegal immigrant women for years by penciling the $83.7-million cost out of the state budget.

But the money has always been reinstated by legislative Democrats who contend that prenatal care saves money by reducing the number of sickly infants who, if born in the United States, are citizens anyway.

The governor and his allies have maintained that prenatal care, like many other state benefits, represent a costly lure that draws immigrants over the border illegally.

Wilson ordered the cutoff of prenatal care benefits weeks after President Clinton signed a landmark welfare bill that denied access to health and social services for illegal immigrants.

Proposition 187, the ballot measure passed by California voters in 1994, also called for the same benefits to be cut. But it has been stalled in a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles for more than three years.