Wilson Testing Appeal of Tying Benefits to Behavior : Prop. 165: Measure would bar additional funds for mothers who have more children while receiving aid.

In her late teens, Sabrina Robles met the man she thought was the answer to her prayers--someone who would provide security, a home and, most important, a way to get off welfare.

He offered the promise of a home life and a father for the son she already had. They would live in Wilmington, where both grew up.

But the dream of security proved elusive when at the age of 20 she became pregnant with his child. His interest in marriage waned and he moved to Texas, leaving Robles to face the future with a toddler, a newborn and no job.

She had wanted to put the welfare system behind her, but found herself locked into it.

Robles and others who have children while on welfare--about one-fifth of mothers--are at thecenter of a growing debate about how to reform the welfare system. The debate has been fueled by Gov. Pete Wilson’s Proposition 165, a wide-ranging November ballot initiative that woulddeny additional welfare payments to any children conceived while their mothers were receiving aid.

Wilson’s idea is one that is beginning to find appeal across the nation. As governors and legislators attempt to cope with growing welfare caseloads and dwindling tax revenues, many, like Wilson, have been drawn to the behavior modification model of welfare reform. They see tying benefits to behavior as a way to control costs and at the same time encourage work and discourage long-term dependency.

So far New Jersey is the only state that has actually implemented legislation that would deny additional payments to mothers who have more children while on welfare. Wilson hopes California will not be far behind. In a speech last November, he introduced that part of his proposal by saying it would “end the insidious incentive we are giving single mothers, especially teen-age girls, to continue having children out of wedlock.”

The proposal is among the most controversial aspects of Wilson’s welfare package because it touches on issues as personal as religion and as intimate as the sexual relationships between men and women. It concerns the most fundamental choices that people make--about sexual activity, birth control, abortion, whether to have children.

Cultural differences play a large role in these decisions and have an effect on welfare birthrates. Latinos and Southeast Asians on welfare tend to have larger families and more frequent welfare births than either African-Americans or whites.

Because the proposal is intended to discourage mothers on welfare from having more children, the abortion issue is at the root of much of the opposition from churches and anti-abortion organizations. They contend that by denying additional cash benefits to mothers who have children while on welfare, the proposal will encourage abortion.

Amy Albright, press secretary for the campaign to pass Proposition 165, acknowledged that “with one provision in one initiative we aren’t going to stop everyone on public assistance from having additional children.” What it will do, she said, is remove a possible economic incentive for childbearing and force welfare mothers to face the consequences of their actions.

If working families have to make do with less when an additional child is born, Albright said, the same thing should be expected of poor families. As the system is now designed, welfare families automatically get additional cash for additional children, a process that shields them in part from the economic burdens a new child usually imposes on a family, she said. “(Welfare) certainly has not served as a disincentive when you find that one in three women on public assistance have additional children after they’ve gone on,” she said.

A Times computer analysis of the raw data collected by the state in an April, 1990, sample survey of 1,184 welfare cases paints a far more complex picture of welfare families than that offered by the Wilson Administration. It also challenges the birthrate figures claimed by the campaign for Proposition 165.

The analysis showed that only a small percentage of the welfare mothers who give birth to additional children are teen-agers. A significant number are married and living in two-parent families. And, instead of one in three, The Times’ analysis found nearly one in five (19%) women give birth while on welfare. (The Wilson Administration apparently counted some women who had gone off welfare, had another child, then began receiving welfare again. Recipients frequently go on and off welfare.)

Most families who receive cash benefits under Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC)--the huge welfare program serving 2.4 million Californians--are single mothers and their children. But poor two-parent families in which the primary wage earner is unemployed are also eligible for assistance and these families account for 22% of California’s AFDC caseload, almost double the proportion in April, 1990.

According to The Times’ computer analysis, 29% of the mothers in two-parent families gave birth to children while on welfare, compared to 18% of the mothers in the single-parent group. In the two-parent families, nearly all of the welfare mothers were married; in the single-parent families about half had never been married.

The data analyzed by The Times showed that most of the welfare mothers giving birth to children--well over half in each group--were 26 or older. Only 5.8% in the single-parent group, and 1.5% in the two-parent group, were teen-agers.

The fact that cultural background has an effect on behavior was also evident from the statistics. The highest birthrate in the single-parent group was among Latinos, in contrast to blacks and whites, who are about even in having the lowest birthrates in the welfare population. In the two-parent group, the highest birthrate was among Southeast Asians, a fact attributed in part to the cultural background of refugees, who account for 7.3% of the welfare rolls.

Hedy Chang, associate director of California Tomorrow, a nonprofit group specializing in multicultural issues, said it is common for poor rural families in Asia and elsewhere to want to have as many children as possible in the belief that large families mean economic security. When those families move to this country, she said, it takes years to learn that a large family is not a source of wealth but can cause economic hardship.

“If you’re from an agrarian society your ability to farm your lands is based on the person-power in your family,” she said. “You move to the United States and it’s not immediately going to be obvious to you that that will not work here.”

Albright acknowledged that welfare women have children for a “whole host of cultural and sociological reasons” but she said at least the initiative “can remove financial incentives in the system so that it is not profitable to enlarge your family when you cannot support yourself.”

The argument taps into middle-class discontent over economic conditions that have caused taxes to go up as wages are dropping and unemployment is rising. “I don’t feel economically able to support a child, so why should someone else ask me as a taxpayer to support additional children for them,” said one working woman, who considers herself a liberal Democrat and opposes other parts of Wilson’s welfare proposal.

Opponents contend that Wilson’s initiative carries behavior modification to the extreme and tramples on the right of a woman to bear children and the right of a family to practice religious beliefs opposing abortion and birth control. They say it hurts children more than adults.

The opposition brings together such diverse and often antagonistic groups as some anti-abortion organizations and abortion rights advocates. Both say the denial of benefits would virtually force pregnant women on welfare to seek an abortion.

Anne Kindt, executive director of the Right to Life League of Southern California, said the state will pay for abortions for women on welfare but that if the Wilson initiative passes it won’t help them support a new child. “(The mother) in effect will be given no choice but to have an abortion,” Kindt said.

Confronted with the prospect that her other children will be further deprived if she has another child, a pregnant welfare mother will be under tremendous pressure to “possibly choose abortion,” said David Pollard, a lobbyist for the California Catholic Conference, which is opposing the measure for that and other reasons.

Albright, however, said the campaign takes the position that if women on welfare have strong beliefs against abortion or birth control they should consider sexual abstinence even if they are married. The purpose of the initiative, she said, is to affect behavior before pregnancy--not afterward.

“When someone is dependent on the taxpayers for their well-being it’s not unreasonable for people who are supporting them to ask that they not enlarge their families or that they abstain from sexual activity until they can support themselves,” she said.

Paula Vandegaer, executive director of the anti-abortion International Life Services, says such a comment suggests government intrusion into the most private of human relationships, that between husband and wife. “This is what happens in Communist China,” she said.

Welfare analysts say that as a practical matter many couples will not abstain from sexual activity even if the initiative passes. And when pregnancies occur, they say, it is the children and not the adults who will suffer most from the denial of additional benefits.

“(The initiative) is not just going to cause the child who is born to suffer but every other child in the family because they’re already not getting what they need. It’s going to take food out of everyone’s mouth,” said Joe Thompson, associate director for Harbor Interfaith, a homeless shelter in San Pedro for families with children.

Albright said children in the family will not be “unduly punished” because although the newborn will not get AFDC benefits, the child will be entitled to federal food stamps and free medical care.

If the initiative passes, government assistance would provide a mother and two children about $741 a month in food stamps and cash benefits. However, if one of the two children is born while the mother is on welfare, the family will get $673. Both sums are below the federally determined poverty level.

Thompson and others who work with the poor insist that the additional $97 to $128 a month the system provides for the care of a new child can hardly be considered profitable. They agree it provides an economic incentive but in the opposite direction; they say most poor women want to avoid pregnancy because they believe the additional welfare does not cover the additional expenses.

Thompson said those who do get pregnant are like Robles. “They enter into a relationship with somebody and commitments are made, but when she gets pregnant they are not honored.”

A study by Mark Rank, a Washington University professor of social work, concluded that poor women generally do not want additional children. Rank surveyed 2,796 welfare households in Wisconsin in the 1980s and found that their birthrate “was lower than the general overall fertility rate.”

“I’m sure there are some isolated cases where a woman says, ‘Well, maybe I’ll have another child to get some more money,’ but that’s the extreme minority,” Rank said in an interview.

Robles, 23 and struggling to find housing that she can afford on a welfare check, said she disregarded birth control because at that point she appeared to be headed for security and marriage.

Did the prospect of additional benefits influence her behavior? The question draws a heated denial. “I don’t want to collect welfare, period,” she said.

When she discovered she was pregnant, Robles said, abortion was out of the question, an abhorrent act that would mean “cutting off something’s life.”

But as soon as the child was born, she said, she immediately underwent a tubal ligation--a surgical method of sterilization.

Bringing up children on welfare is tough, she said, gesturing toward the noisy hallway of the Family Shelter for the Homeless where she lives. She says the Long Beach shelter run by Catholic Charities took her in after a landlord ordered her to move because there were too many people living in her apartment.

She spends her days looking for housing and says she has no time for, or interest in, men. “My eyes are not on men now at all--not for security, not for anything,” she said emphatically. “There have only been these six arms around each other,” she added, gesturing toward her children. “There hasn’t been a fourth person there crying with us in the hard times.”

Welfare Babies

Proposition 165 would eliminate AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) benefits for “welfare babies,” children that are born 10 months or more after a mother begins receiving benefits for her existing children.

Based on a study of state welfare survey data by Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis, about 19% of welfare mothers have children who would be affected. But, because benefits for each additional child decrease, overall savings would be only about 11%.

AFDC recipients are divided here into two categories: Single-parent families and two-parent families in which the primary wage-earner is unemployed.

THE NUMBERS

% of welfare % of mothers with Category caseload welfare babies Single Parent 87.8% 18.0% Unemployed 12.2% 29.1% Overall 100.0% 19.4%

AGE OF MOTHERS

Most welfare babies are born to women over 20. Unwed teen-age mothers account for relatively few.

Single parent Unemployed Age 16-19 5.8% 1.5% Age 20-25 40.9% 31.7% Age 26-30 29.2% 28.7% Age 31-35 16.8% 27.5% Age 36 and up 7.3% 10.6%

NUMBER OF CHILDREN

The majority of mothers who conceive while receiving benefits have only one child after going on welfare. But more than a third have two or more welfare babies.

Category 1 child 2 children 3 or more Single Parent 64.9% 22.5% 12.6% Unemployed 62.4% 21.2% 16.4%

SOURCE: California Department of Social Services; April, 1990, characteristics survey of AFDC cases.