Four Years of the EMIC Program *

Four years ago Congress made the first appropriation for "medical, nursing, and hospital maternity and infant care for wives and infants of enlisted men in the armed forces of the United States of the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh grades." The following month, April 1943, plans for the operation of the Emergency Maternity and Infant Care (EMIC) program were approved by the Children's Bureau for 13 States, and within a year all 48 States, the District of Columbia, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico were operating programs under approved plans. Before the EMIC program went into effect, Washington was the first State to set up a program for the care of wives of servicemen. This was done in 1941 as a small project under the Maternal and Child Health program of the State Department of Health. Other States followed with similar projects, but these were necessarily limited in scope because of the insufficiency of Federal and State funds available under Title V, Part 1, of the Social Security Act. It was not until Congress , in 1943, began to make special appropriations for grants to Statest for emergency maternity and infant care that it became possible for all States to set up Statewide programs providing for all necessary maternity and infant care for wives and infants of servicemen in the four lowest pay grades. The primary purpose of the EMIC program was to raise the morale of enlisted men by relieving them of concern over the uncertainty of the availability of maternity care for their wives and medical and hospital care for their infants, and of anxiety as to how the cost of this care would be met. Under this program, enlisted men who are in one of the four lowest pay grades know that their wives are entitled to complete maternity care and also that their babies up to one year of age are entitled to all necessary medical, hospital, and nursing care. Furthermore , both maternity and infant care are given without a means test and