This Administrative Petition was filed by Public Advocates in June 1983 with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on behalf of civil rights, women, and health organizations. The petition was an effort to move national leaders to address the critical issue of infant mortality, specifically how the problem related to not providing poor women with access to comprehensive prenatal care. Public Advocates’ staff attorney Lois Salisbury appeared before the Select Committee of Hunger of the U.S. Congress to argue for the need to give women widespread access to prenatal care as a way to address the high infant mortality rates in the U.S. She and staff attorney Angela Glover Blackwell presented results from a survey done at the time by Public Advocates with the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health of 45 US cities which showed a widening gap between the survivability of black and white babies, in part due to low birth weights.