I really felt an incredible desire to be ill upon reading this article, for a whole bunch of different reasons.

Elva Hernández never imagined she'd give birth to a son in a medical helicopter flying over the Arizona desert.

The 29-year-old woman, who was seven months' pregnant, felt contractions and went into labor after walking in the heat, rain and in the cold of night for nearly 20 hours as she and her family tried to illegally enter the United States.

Hernández, her children and her husband were abandoned by a smuggler soon after she went into labor.

Last Sunday, she gave birth in the helicopter minutes after being rescued by U.S. Border Patrol agents.

She and the premature baby, Christian, a new U.S. citizen, were taken to Tucson's University Medical Center. The infant is stable, but remains in intensive care. Hernández left the hospital Tuesday.

Now there is an obvious question -- where is the money coming from to pay for all of the high-priced medical care for this sick baby? It must be coming from the Mexican government, right? Wrong! The family is living in the local Ronald McDonald House, at no cost to them or their government. And the tab from the hospital? You already know the answer.

The cost of Christian's medical care is still unknown, said UMC spokeswoman Katie Riley. But with neonatal emergency-room care costs of up to $3,000 a day, the total can mount quickly.

If the family can't pay the bill, it will be absorbed by the hospital and passed on to consumers and taxpayers.

Even the idiot spokesman from the Office of Citizaenship and Immigration Services sided with the border-jumping babymaker and her family.

William N. Johnston, who heads the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Citizenship and Immigration Services in Tucson, said Christian's birth on U.S. soil makes him a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

When the child turns 21, he can petition to legally bring his parents and siblings to the United States.

"It's an unfortunate part of U.S. policies," said Johnston. "If the law would permit her to stay and work she would pay her hospital fees and the taxpayers wouldn't have anything to complain about. But instead she will be deported with the newborn."

Well, that's one bureaucrat I think needs to be fired -- and one amendment to the Constitution that needs to be modified. We shouldn't be rewarding lawbreakers with free medical care and a pass to the head of the line for a green card because they managed to have a child in this country. We need to amend the law so that any kid who is not the child of two citizens or individuals otherwise legally in the country does not get US citizenship, but is instead considered a citizen of the border-jumping parent's homeland. That will solve the anchor-baby problem.

Either that, or we need to have a law terminating the parental rights of border-jumping parents over their American citizen offspring, making them immediately eligible for placement in adoptive homes.

Do I sound harsh? Probably. But I simply believe we need to strip away the incentives for coming into the US illegally.

Posted by: Greg at 09:08 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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