Proclamation 5375

By the President of the United States of America A Proclamation

This year, we mark the golden anniversary of the landmark maternal and child health legislation, Title V of the Social Security Act. Under that authority, the Federal government has sponsored a wide variety of training, demonstration, research, and related special activities that have made a great contribution to our effectiveness in providing health care to American mothers and their children.

Even more important, I believe, is the fact that for 50 years we have provided assistance to the States through formula grants and, more recently, through the Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant. Through this approach, States have matched Federal funds and have assumed full responsibility for program administration. We can all take pride in this relationship that has supported a wide range of vital preventive and therapeutic services for mothers and infants and children and adolescents, including highly sophisticated help to children with special needs, such as those with handicaps and chronic illness. We can take pride in the services provided and, especially, in the way they are provided, for the nature, scope, location, and timing of these services are determined as they should be-at the State and community levels, and by the medical professionals at the scene. These are the people who know firsthand what the greatest needs are and how best to respond to them.

On this Child Health Day, 1985, as we celebrate 50 years of cooperative endeavor in support of maternal and child health, we should rededicate ourselves to the expansion of State and local responsibility in this extremely important field. We must do everything necessary to protect the health of our mothers and children. We must remember that the best way to do this is to entrust the responsibilities and the needed resources to the States and communities in which they live.

Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, pursuant to a joint resolution approved May 18, 1928, as amended (36 U.S.C. 143), do hereby proclaim Monday, October 7, 1985, as Child Health Day.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of October, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and tenth.

RONALD REAGAN

[Filed with the Office of the Federal Register, 10:59 a.m., October 7, 1985]