Woman 1: The way the economy is today is just outrageous. The groceries have gone up.

Woman 2: I had a daughter that was premature and I was a single mom, not working at the time, WIC helped me out a lot.

Melissa Boteach: WIC stands for the special supplemental nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children. And basically what it does, it provides nutritional supports to pregnant women, new moms, and children under 5 when they're at their most vulnerable stage. It provides those critical nutrition building blocks such as a monthly food package, a nutrition education, breastfeeding support, and all those kinds of things.

The Republicans in the House have proposed a spending bill for next year that would WIC by over $650 million.

Cheryl Bruce: Our total loss of funding is about $335,000. The way that will translate into our actual practice this year is there are some vacancies that we will not be able to fill and we did lose an actual person, one of our nutritionists this.

Joy Moses: When poor people don't have access to the services they need, they tend to have negative outcomes that cost us more. For instance, when we think about programs like WIC, they really help prevent health complications and concerns that really drive up costs in our health care system. By just providing mothers and children with healthy food from the beginning, we can have healthier babies that don't draw on those systems to a degree that they wouldn’t otherwise have to.

Sindy Ruiz: My son is 2 1/2. Before I came to this program, I had a full different concept of nutrition, but once I came here, they also support, they also gave me referrals to programs that are out here that I did not know. And now I know my child has a better future because now I know more about the nutritional facts.

Melissa Boteach: It is possible not just to avoid cutting programs but to actually invest in the antipoverty programs that we need to thrive, so some examples would be closing wasteful tax loopholes and examine military spending to see if there's strategic places where we can surgically cut, to examine how we can curb long term health care cost, and then examining across the entire budget, not just in domestic discretionary programs where the bulk of low-income programs are located but across the entire budgets for effective and strategic spending cuts. But cutting WIC is not the way to do this. We all know that we have to cut the deficit, we all know that it's a long-term problem that we have to address. But how we do it, how we achieve that deficit reduction, is going to define us as a nation.