PROCLAMATION 5874—SEPT. 29, 1988
102 STAT. 5075
Child Health Day, 1988, is a time for reflection on what we have achieved—and for rededication to tasks not yet accomplished. We must continue to battle conditions such as family breakup, poverty, and moral confusion that can cause health problems in children. We must also fight infant mortality, drinking and driving, and problems that can affect children both born and unborn, such as the HIV, poor eating habits, smoking, illegal drug use and alcohol abuse. We must also reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancy—as well as the spread of venereal diseases and the HIV—by giving young boys and girls good example and solid teaching about affirming life and avoiding sexual relations outside of marriage. And teenagers who do become pregnant need our help as individuals, families, and communities, to see them through their difficulties, not to condemn them or abandon them to the dead end of abortion. We must also do a much better job of encouraging adoption as a compassionate alternative to abortion. Advances in technology continue to help us save the lives of many fragile infants and to rescue babies whose premature birth would once have meant certain death. We are also more and more able to treat children in the womb for a variety of illnesses and conditions. These developments demonstrate a stark contradiction in one aspect of our national child health policies—the social environment that fosters often heroic efforts to save little ones whose parents want them, but denies legal protection to the unborn whose parents do not want them. We must restore the right to life and our respect for the dignity and worth of every individual. Our success in caring for all of our children will continue to determine our faithfulness to our heritage and our fate as a Nation. In our every endeavor, let us pray as did the parent portrayed by the poet, "From cut and from tumble, from sickness and weeping. May God have my jewel this day in His keeping." NOW, THEREFORE, I, RONALD REAGAN, President of the United States of America, pursuant to a joint resolution approved on May 18, 1928, as amended (36 U.S.C. 143), do hereby proclaim Monday, October 3, 1988, as Child Health Day. IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twentyninth day of September, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-eight, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirteenth. RONALD REAGAN
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