American Women Having Babies for Money and Benefits
Doing the Math on the Welfare 'Family Cap'
By Barbara Vobejda and Judith HavemannWashington Post Staff Writers
Dominicus, March xxx 1997; Page A01
Two-month-old Michael Myers-Evans has huge, dark optics, just like his brother and two sisters. Like his siblings, he is poor, the child of a single, unemployed mother.
But in one very of import way, Michael is dissimilar from the remainder of his family, different from almost everyone else in his circumstances: He is not eligible for welfare.
Michael is i of the first generation of babies being born around the country under a controversial new policy known equally the "family unit cap." Now in place in 19 states, the family cap denies additional benefits to children conceived and born while their mothers are receiving public assistance.
That means that Michael's mother, 25-year-old Nandora Myers, is now supporting iv children on the same $650 monthly welfare payment she received when she had three children. And that basic calculus defies the history of federal welfare policy, which until now has e'er tied the level of benefits to the size of ane's family.
"It's the children that are going to suffer," said Nandora Myers. But and then, in a twist of incongruity, she adds that the policy makes some sense. "All these women having all these babies and not being able to take care of them is not right."
For years, social scientists and Washington lawmakers take waged an emotional debate over whether welfare benefits affect beliefs – whether unmarried women were having children knowing they could support them at taxpayer expense. At present, as an assortment of welfare changes takes hold, the family cap is the master revision aimed at severing the link between coin and babies.
It seeks to ship a bulletin to poor women that having more than children will only increase hardship and impecuniousness – not bring extra greenbacks. That message is intended to be so clear and harsh that it will reach into the almost private sexual relationships, persuading women to terminate having children they cannot back up.
Conservatives have pushed hard to see the bitterly contested policy adopted in state capitals around the country, describing it as the centerpiece of their efforts to lower out-of-wedlock births. If information technology works, and welfare births decline, they would prove a disquisitional point: New welfare policies tin indeed change human behavior.
Only in Massachusetts, and then far, the evidence is, at the very least, deadening in coming. While a scattering of other states are reporting cryptic or conflicting results from the combination of the family cap and dozens of other policy changes occurring simultaneously, the rational calculation made by Massachusetts legislators – dock a welfare check and women will alter their lives – has still to prove true.
In this New England state, where The Washington Post is chronicling the impact of this celebrated reform, the family cap has had no discernible outcome on the birth rates of welfare recipients.
Women have known that the cap would be going into issue for more than a year, so they had plenty of fourth dimension to have precautions to avoid getting pregnant.
Nevertheless, in the first five months since the cap went into effect, 3,390 babies were born to the state's welfare mothers, slightly more than the iii,333 average for a comparable period the previous yr. And that has happened as welfare caseloads have declined by about 12 per centum, a trend that should have resulted in fewer welfare births.
Most of the women Post reporters spoke with said they knew about the cap, either through interviews with their caseworkers or equally a event of the mass publicity surrounding the new policy. The message, they said, was clear: If they had another baby, it wouldn't put an additional $90 a month in their pockets – as the erstwhile policy did. Country Rep. Anne Paulsen (D), a critic of the policy, said the new numbers indicate the cap is declining to run across the goal its supporters promised.
"The signal made in passing it was that nosotros would reduce the number of children born on public assistance," she said. "We haven't done that."
Throughout the debate over the family cap, liberals accept argued that information technology punishes innocent children, and other groups have warned that it could encourage women to seek abortions.
Supporters have countered that the family cap simply removes a perverse incentive for welfare mothers to have more babies in order to get more money.
After all, if these women had jobs, conservatives argue, having another child wouldn't automatically produce a pay enhance. That statement has caught on, transforming the family unit cap from a conservative cause to one that is gradually gaining wider support.
Now, with very preliminary data emerging from a few of united states with family caps, officials are eager to translate apparent drops in welfare births in four states as a sign that the policy has worked.
The stakes are enormous. Many governors' political fortunes are riding on the success of the welfare reforms they accept championed. And the financial incentives are equally potent: States that successfully drive down out-of-marriage birth rates without increasing abortions can win as much equally $25 million a year in an "illegitimacy bonus" created in the federal welfare law enacted concluding twelvemonth. Officials already are scrambling to do everything they tin can to win the money, targeting efforts specially at lowering births amidst welfare mothers.
Almost states with family caps have not collected or released nativity rates or have all the same to begin denying benefits. In some states, including Nebraska and Arkansas, scientific studies using control groups that were evaluated by independent researchers with no stake in the outcome have found no difference in births between women who are covered by the cap and others who would continue receiving benefits.
Just supporters of family cap policies say they run across signs of success in several states.
Based on a few months' information, Virginia reports a xv pct decline in welfare births, Arizona a drib of 6 percent and, in Mississippi, land officials report an amazing 45 percent drop.
In New Bailiwick of jersey, where the family unit cap has been in effect since the fall of 1993, officials say births reported by women on welfare accept fallen past 15 percent.
Officials in several states agree that whatever drib in births is probably not due to the family cap alone.
Even the more cautious welfare researchers say information technology is possible that the welfare reform argue and its strong bulletin emphasizing personal responsibleness – not just the family unit cap – could be having an result on behavior – peradventure a short-lived "stupor effect" that may misemploy after.
"I'one thousand non going to say the family cap is causing all that," said Scott C. Oostdyk, Virginia'southward deputy secretary for wellness and homo resources. "A lot of folks got the message they were outside the norm and maybe this was something that was not socially acceptable."
In New Jersey, the land implemented the family unit cap at the same fourth dimension it told mothers on welfare that they must work or get training or didactics if their youngest child was 2 or older.
"We want people to make responsible decisions about childbearing," said New Jersey Welfare Commissioner William Waldman. "I believe the public message does have an impact on people's beliefs."
But welfare researchers say whatever drop in births should be seen in the context of what is happening beyond the country. Nationally, birth rates dropped 7 percent betwixt 1990 and 1995, according to the National Heart for Wellness Statistics. Over the same period, rates dropped 17 percentage for black women, who are disproportionately represented in the welfare population.
That makes it difficult to know how much of the drop in states reporting notable declines would have happened regardless of welfare policy changes.
Researchers also caution that the family unit cap numbers raise numerous unanswered questions, among them: Could falling birth rates in some states exist explained by an increase in abortions? Abortion statistics are notoriously poor in many states. Are women not bothering to report new births because they no longer receive the additional benefits? Are some families claiming that a new child volition exist raised by a grandmother or other relative as a subterfuge to continue receiving benefits? Are young women increasing their use of more long-term contraceptives, such as Norplant and Depo-Provera?
In Massachusetts, welfare director Claire McIntire argues that the principal purpose of the family unit cap was not to reduce births, and that five months of apartment birth numbers is not nearly plenty time to know its outcome on a mother's determination to bear more than children.
"We're asking welfare mothers to take responsibility for what they practise," she said. "We're not saying y'all're admittedly forbidden to take children. Information technology'southward your option, knowing if you lot take a child you volition receive no additional coin from the taxpayers."
1 thing is clear: The threat of losing out on $90 a month in actress benefits doesn't get much notice in the cluttered lives of many women on welfare. Information technology must compete with an often chronic state of crisis, with frequent moves from ane tenuous household to another, with a abiding struggle to pay the bills, and with neighborhoods wracked past violence and crime, and boyfriends in and out of jail.
Despite all that, Nandora Myers and other women on welfare here say they were aware of the family cap and other changing welfare rules. Information technology just wasn't enough to change their lives.
"I was thinking I got to be conscientious," said Myers. She had been using Depo-Provera, a contraceptive delivered in a shot every three months. "I must have missed the appointment," she said. "I don't know what I was thinking. I had iii little kids. Sometimes things just slip my mind."
Compared with many others on the caseload, Myers has some advantages. She completed high schoolhouse and has held several jobs over the years. Simply for reasons not even she can explain, it seems impossible for her to take control of her life the manner policy makers envision she should.
As she describes her thinking on the family cap, the realities of beingness a unmarried female parent of four young children intrude: Five-year-sometime Kyle interrupts her to denote that the infant is crying. Myers must shoo away 2-year-onetime Ashley, who seems to have upset Michael. She sends Kyle to fetch a bottle. Just her 4-twelvemonth-erstwhile, Kwameeshie, is quiet.
The question of how she concluded up bearing 4 children by three different fathers is non a elementary one to answer. Myers said she had been taking nativity control pills, then enforced a condom dominion, and then opted for the foolproof method of Depo-Provera.
When even that didn't work and she had Michael, she went after a permanent solution, getting her tubes tied. "They gladly did information technology," she said.
If welfare reformers believed they could reduce births amidst Myers and other poor women, they may accept underestimated what they were up against. More than than one-half of all pregnancies in this state are unintended, co-ordinate to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. That figure climbs for poor, less educated, young and minority women. But fifty-fifty amid college-income women, 45 percent of pregnancies are unintended, a term defined as mistimed or unwanted.
Nineteen-year-sometime Stacey Burns, for example, said she was using nascency control pills when she discovered she was significant. She already was raising a infant daughter on her own, but had begun to take control of her life. She had completed her high school equivalency examination, had been accepted at customs college and had bundled for financial assistance. When she plant out she was meaning for a second time, she was devastated.
"My daughter wasn't even a year erstwhile," said Burns, who is unmarried and living in a Cosmic Charities group dwelling house for teenage mothers in Lynn, Mass. "I'yard still not ready to have care of two kids, just I don't believe in abortion or giving upwardly my babe for adoption. I experience like I had no selection."
She knew about the family cap, but had given it picayune thought since she wanted to prevent another pregnancy for her own reasons. "The hardest part," she said, "is just gonna exist buying diapers and everything else I need."
To the lowest degree surprised by the unchanged welfare birth numbers in Massachusetts are social workers who spend their days counseling immature mothers.
Sylvia Missal, who runs a young parent program at Children's Hospital in Boston, said the welfare mothers she deals with are very much aware of the family cap. "Long before this rule, boyish girls were saying they didn't want to have a second baby," she said. "But they're non able to organize themselves" to foreclose it.
Researchers who take looked at welfare policies and their impact effectually the country tend to believe that the economical incentive in the family cap is relatively weak – loss of boosted benefits that, across the nation, typically amount to around $lxx a month. Also, the loss of that income is mitigated to some extent by an increase in nutrient stamps triggered past the new kid.
"Nosotros're trying to alter the most fundamentally, biologically programmed impulses of man beings – to have babies – by waving $40 a calendar month at them," said Harvard University sociologist Christopher Jencks. "Would you have expected this to turn people around in some way?"
Other welfare changes, including work requirements and time limits, are much more likely to have an bear on, according to Jencks and several other analysts. When women contemplate supporting three children, rather than 1 or two, after their time limit on welfare runs out, or paying child care costs for more children, they will be more than likely to avoid having bigger families, they say.
Research has shown that births are likely to fall when women are more than educated and come across promising futures for themselves. Merely nigh half of all AFDC mothers do not have a high school diploma, and programs aimed at improving the future prospects of teenage welfare mothers have been merely marginally successful.
Still Douglas Besharov, a welfare researcher at the American Enterprise Plant, argues that young women in the inner metropolis are arresting the bulletin that welfare volition no longer exist a lifelong option for them to autumn dorsum on.
"Family caps, welfare reform, talking about illegitimacy is all a form of social signaling," he said. "Nosotros're irresolute people'southward views of what it means to have a baby when you cannot provide for it. In that location has been a body of water change in public attitudes on this."
He also argued that the family unit cap may help social workers who, for fear of sounding judgmental, take institute it hard to tell young women they should not take more than children until they tin can support them. At present social workers can merely signal to the policy.
For some young women, even so, the bulletin intended by family unit cap sponsors is ringing hollow.
"It's like a stranger in the street telling me I shouldn't clothing those sneakers," said eighteen-yr-old Shante Hodges, whose 3rd child is due in April. "The politicians tell them not to have a infant, simply that doesn't hateful they're not going to have information technology. And they're going to detect one style or another to support their child."
Hodges, who has a 3-twelvemonth-old son and a 2-year-old daughter, knew about the family cap, and fifty-fifty gives it something of an endorsement, saying some women "think they tin have equally many kids as they want and welfare will have care of them."
Simply she also finds it naive that lawmakers believed they could modify a adult female's mind about whether to have a babe past taking that money away.
The extra money, she said, "is not going to put Pampers on your infant. It's not going to feed your baby when your baby is hungry."
Hodges had been on birth control pills, she said, but quit taking them considering her boyfriend was in jail. When he was released, she didn't accept any contraceptives around the house. And that'southward when she became meaning.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Mail Visitor
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