Welfare ‘Family Cap’ Fails to Cut Birthrate in N.J.

WASHINGTON — The first state in the nation to end the practice of increasing a welfare check when a recipient has another baby conceded Thursday that the policy has failed to drive down birthrates among women on the welfare rolls.

The Rutgers University study leading to that conclusion, commissioned by the state of New Jersey, may deal a blow to the 20 other states--including California--which since have adopted “family caps.” And it poses a direct challenge to conservatives who had argued that a federally mandated family cap is necessary for welfare reform to succeed nationally.

The new findings also appear to boost prospects for a lawsuit challenging the policy of excluding infants born to public aid recipients from welfare coverage. In pressing their challenge in New Jersey state court, the American Civil Liberties Union and National Organization for Women have charged that family caps--or “child exclusion laws” as they call them--are ineffective and punish children for their parents’ actions.

If that suit prevails, attorneys said that California’s family cap would become vulnerable to court challenges on the same grounds.

But New Jersey officials defended their state’s controversial family cap Thursday, even as they released the report’s less-than-positive results. While the policy has denied direct cash payments to the mothers of 20,000 children born in New Jersey since 1993, officials said that it has helped to “mainstream” welfare recipients and focus them on their personal responsibilities to support their families through work.

“I still believe the power of the public message on personal responsibility makes it a policy worth continuing,” said New Jersey Human Services Commissioner William Waldman. “The policy here was to put people on welfare in the same position of other people” who make the choice to have a baby--that they may not get a raise at work when they have another child.

Officials pointed to study findings showing that large majorities of women affected by the cap said that they believed it promoted individual responsibility (86.1%) and that it kept women focused on job training and careers (71.5%). Two in three welfare recipients surveyed said that they believed the family cap is “a fair rule.”

In the court challenge underway in New Jersey, those survey findings may be used to counter another challenge to the family cap: that it coerces women’s reproductive decisions and thus invades their privacy. To the contrary, only 36.5% of welfare recipients surveyed agreed with the assertion that a family cap “interferes with a woman’s right to have a baby.”

New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican, said Thursday that the goal of the family cap was never to reduce the birthrate or to save money but to “send a message of personal responsibility to families on welfare . . . that mothers and fathers--not taxpayers--need to take responsibility for caring for children they bring into this world.”

Throughout last year’s congressional debate over welfare reform, a group of conservative lawmakers sought to require all states to deny welfare increases to recipients who give birth while on public aid. But its efforts were defeated by an unusual coalition of interest groups. It included antiabortion groups that feared the policy would drive more women to seek abortions, and women’s and reproductive rights groups that saw it as an unwarranted intrusion into women’s most personal decisions.

In the end, Congress left it to individual states to decide whether to adopt a family cap; 21 states have. California’s plan, adopted Sept. 1, would block any grant increase to welfare recipients who have additional children while on aid. But it would continue to provide food stamps and Medi-Cal coverage to children born to dependent parents and would exempt children born as a result of rape, incest or provable contraceptive failure.

According to the New Jersey study, birthrates there decreased equally between 1991 (a year before the cap was instituted) and 1994 (two years into the program) among those women who were subject to family caps and those who were told that they would be exempt from the new policy. Birthrates also decreased at similar rates among New Jersey’s general population.

There is little doubt that family caps are saving states money that they otherwise would be spending in additional welfare. The New Jersey policy is thought to be saving more than $15 million a year.

The finding that financial incentives have little impact on poor women’s childbearing decisions is consistent with the conclusions from less comprehensive studies. Massachusetts officials, for instance, have acknowledged that their state’s new family cap has had no effect on recipients’ birthrates.

By some measures, women on welfare have children at a rate about half that of women in the general population of similar age.

“They all said that [having another child] ‘is about the last thing I want to do; I want to get off welfare,’ ” said professor Mark Rank of the School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, who studied a similar program in Wisconsin over eight years. “Most would just laugh in your face and say, ‘Look, it costs a lot more than the extra money you get per month to raise a child.’ ”

At the same time, the New Jersey study showed that abortion rates went down, not up, for women subject to family caps and that the rate of pregnancy termination was the same for the family-cap subjects as it was for other welfare recipients. However, women subject to the family cap were slightly more likely than other welfare recipients to seek access to family planning services.

In another finding, the study provided encouraging news for the growing number of states that have turned away education-oriented welfare efforts in favor of those that stress work first. Welfare recipients placed into programs emphasizing education and family tended to remain on welfare and/or food stamps longer than those placed in strongly work-oriented programs.