Topeka ? A state lawmaker Monday said she would push to expand taxpayer-funded prenatal care, an idea that was killed last year in a dispute between opponents and supporters of abortion rights.

The Medicaid program, funded by state and federal money, already provides prenatal care to low-income Kansans.

But Rep. Brenda Landwehr, a Wichita Republican, said she wanted to increase the number of those eligible by raising the income levels of those who could apply.

Landwehr, who is vice chairwoman of the House-Senate Committee on Children’s Issues, said the legislation was needed to reduce the incidence of low-birth-weight babies and their accompanying high medical costs.

“Those babies may be costing us a whole lot more down the road,” she said.

A state study last year showed that children who weigh under five pounds, eight ounces at birth sustained medical costs five times more than normal-birth-weight babies — $16,000 compared with $3,100 — during the first year of life.

Landwehr, an abortion opponent, also said she would propose that the health care coverage be applied to the unborn child.

That is what has caught the ire of abortion-rights supporters.

“We would see it as an agenda about establishing when human life begins,” said Anna Holcombe, of Lawrence, lobbyist for the Kansas National Organization for Women.

During the last legislative session, Holcombe and other abortion-rights activists stopped a similar measure, which they described as a backdoor way to give fetuses special rights that would eventually lead to legislation restricting abortions.

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But Landwehr said “I don’t use back doors.”

She said her proposal had nothing to do with the battle over abortion, and that she was ready to discuss with abortion-rights activists ways to write the measure so that it wouldn’t become entangled in an abortion debate. Holcombe said she would welcome the opportunity to speak with Landwehr about the issue.

Landwehr said she also was dismayed by a state estimate of how much her proposal would cost.

When the measure was considered during the legislative session in February, the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services estimated the bill had the potential of making 714 more women eligible for coverage at a cost of $2.4 million.

On Monday, SRS nearly quadrupled that estimate to 2,700 women at a cost of $9.1 million.

Landwehr said the new estimate was made “to discourage” passage of the legislation. But Scott Brunner, director of medical policy and Medicaid for SRS, said the new estimate was based on a more in-depth examination of poverty and fertility rates. “It’s not to discourage,” he said. “It’s up to the Legislature on what they want to cover.”