There Is No ‘Right’ to Welfare : Litigation in New Jersey based on such a premise could end any prospect for reform.

Should welfare be a constitutional right? A federal court in New Jersey will soon address this profoundly troubling question.

Litigation by the National Organization for Women, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Services Corp. seeks to establish that capping certain benefits for welfare recipients who become pregnant violates the right to procreate. Logically, and perhaps legally, such a precedent would make impossible any reduction in benefits to single mothers, by far the largest group receiving welfare. This would effectively end the prospects for serious welfare reform, including such measures as the Clinton Administration’s “two years and out” proposal.

The very idea that there is a constitutional right to welfare seems preposterous, given the overwhelming evidence that welfare programs kill individual initiative, break up families and breed dependency. Welfare’s tragic legacy is propelling unprecedented bipartisan reform efforts in more and more states. The White House has promised to introduce a welfare-reform proposal. And the Maryland NAACP just released a report citing welfare as a “major contributing factor to the crime problem.”

The NOW lawsuit arises from the Family Support Act, passed in 1988. That legislation, championed by Sen. Daniel PatrickMoynihan (D-N.Y.), recognized the urgent need to break the cycle of dependency and degradation fostered by the welfare system. It also wisely recognized that, given the complexity of the welfare issue, a quick and universal solution was impossible. To create the greatest likelihood of success, Congress permitted each state to set up a welfare-reform program designed for its population and its particular circumstances. Each program was to be monitored, and the successes could then be incorporated into programs throughout the nation.

Yet from the outset, professional advocates who live off the welfare state opposed any meaningful reform. When the Family Support Act was being debated, Susan Rees, executive director of the Coalition of Human Needs, speaking for a large anti-welfare-reform coalition, stated, “What welfare advocates object to most is the undermining of this fundamental principle of national entitlement.” The opposition failed to stop the legislation and has not been able politically to turn back the rising tide of state reform efforts. So when New Jersey passed the first reform program under this new law, welfare advocates went to court.

Like most of the state programs debated or passed thus far, New Jersey’s reform effort attempts to strike a balance that encourages and facilitates transition into the work force while changing welfare incentives that foster family breakup, out-of-wedlock births and parental irresponsibility. These latter measures recognize that out-of-wedlock births have reached crisis levels among welfare mothers. Polls reflect strong support across racial lines for efforts to curb this alarming trend.

New Jersey’s most controversial provision, aimed at decreasing out-of-wedlock births, established that mothers receiving Aid to Families With Dependent Children will no longer receive a $64-per-month increase for having another baby.

Skeptics charge that $64--less than $800 per year--is too little to make a difference in behavior but enough to unfairly hurt the mother and child. This is exactly the kind of difficult public-policy question that state experiences, not courts, are designed to answer if allowed to proceed. Indeed, virtually every proposed state welfare-reform program contains a similar provision.

However, NOW and its co-plaintiffs argue that the denial of an increased welfare payment for a new child violates the woman’s right to “make decisions about family composition, conception and childbirth without undue government intrusion.” Although this would be a dramatic expansion of existing law, it would not be the first time a court created a new right that soon became the law of the land. The implications would be staggering. Victory by NOW would not merely enshrine the principle of national entitlement by creating a “right” to state-funded procreation; it would also render impossible even modest cuts in welfare programs.

This lawsuit confuses the cure with the disease. Failure to remedy the welfare dilemma will consign yet another generation to dependency. If courageous and creative reform programs like New Jersey’s fall prey to ideologically driven litigation, it will paralyze our society’s urgent effort to produce an antidote to welfare’s poison.