Returning to Bad Old Days of Orphanages : Is a family valid only if it can survive in the free market?

Orphanages? Is Newt Gingrich a caricature in a “Saturday Night Live” put-down of heartless conservatives? Or have the media, as the speaker-to-be charged last week, made a mockery of a reasonable proposal for the government to step in to replace an abusive family situation?

If the latter is all that Gingrich intended, no reasonable person--and certainly no liberal--would object. The law everywhere in this country specifies just such a remedy when the well-being of a child is at risk, whether the family is rich or poor. And it was liberals--”bleeding-heart liberals” if you will--who wrote most of those laws, often over the objection of so-called pro-family conservatives. If Gingrich now seeks to join in that struggle to protect neglected and abused kids, surely liberals would welcome him.

But this is not the issue. Let us be clear about what the new Republican leadership advocates: seizing and putting in institutions the children of families who cannot support themselves. This is the “welfare reform” they envision: If a parent cannot become self-sufficient, welfare payments will end and their children will be made wards of the state. As Time magazine pointed out, the Gingrich standard violates a consensus in this country first enunciated in the Teddy Roosevelt Administration that “no child should be deprived of his family by reason of poverty alone.”

That principle was attacked seven months ago, when Gingrich argued in a speech that welfare should be denied to teen-age mothers. He said that if the denial of aid meant they could not support their children, “We’ll help you with foster care, we’ll help you with orphanages, we’ll help you with adoption.” Anything but helping you raise your child.

Gingrich’s “contract With America” goes further, with its “tough two-years-and-out provision” that would destroy the safety net for all welfare recipients.

But what happens to 9 million children when their families are summarily cut off from welfare benefits? The honest if heartless answer was provided by Rep. Bill Archer (R-Tex.) the incoming head of the crucial Ways and Means Committee: “You lose your welfare benefits and if the children cannot be supported by you, they have to be put into foster homes.”

In the new religion of the Republican right, the family unit is only to be respected if it can survive in the free market. The assumption is that if a woman cannot find a job, her love for her child is invalidated. To accept this sinister absurdity requires some distance from the actual experience of caring for children.

“It amazes me that we are even discussing that option,” said Gerald Zaslaw, speaking from 25 years of experience. “It would not be prudent nor beneficial to society to return to housing children in a manner which we outgrew over 40 years ago. Orphanages went away because of recognition that children should be with their families.”

Zaslaw heads the 17-acre Vista del Mar, a child and family services organization that began as a Los Angeles orphanage back in 1908. Vista del Mar has been a pioneer in shoring up families when possible and running foster-care settings when it’s not. They don’t warehouse “orphans” there anymore because more enlightened policies have been developed.

Now the original facility is reserved for 90 kids with pronounced behavioral and medical problems. An option of last resort, Vista Del Mar spends $50,000 annually per child--most from government sources--and boasts a 70% success rate in transitioning kids back into community life. “Our goal is to reunite that family,” Zaslaw said.

“Every child wants to go back to their family, no matter how abused,” he added. “They always have this fantasy that they are going to go home.” If that option proves unworkable, Vista del Mar employs foster homes. Still, it is not the panacea that the new right makes it appear. A kid typically “may go through five to 15 foster homes,” Zaslaw said. “Foster parents become foster parents for a few years and then decide they’re not interested in being foster parents any more.”

Nor are adoptions, the third Gingrich palliative, a serious alternative. Vista del Mar runs the only licensed adoption program in Los Angeles County. Other agencies dropped out because it is expensive to monitor and placement is often very difficult. Zaslaw is currently attempting to place two orphaned brothers, 12 and 10, who are not problem kids. “We can’t find anybody to take them,” he said.

No wonder Zaslaw judges harshly proposals that would remove children from mothers capable of parenting. “It’s a punitive response: We are going to get those welfare mothers. I think about some of this craziness that is being talked about. . . . It’s just ludicrous.”