‘Family Cap’ Law Increased Abortion Rate, Study Finds

A research team from Rutgers University has concluded that New Jersey’s welfare law increased abortions among the state’s approximately 85,000 welfare families by about 240 a year, but state officials have disputed the report and sent it back for revisions, state officials and opponents of the policy said Monday.

In 1991, New Jersey became the first state to pass a controversial “family cap,” which denies additional benefits to mothers who have more children while they are on the welfare rolls. Such families were denied an extra $64 a month as a result of the policy.

The family cap was designed to send a powerful signal to mothers to postpone having children they can’t support. An unusual coalition of Roman Catholics, conservative family groups and liberal advocates argued against it, saying it would raise the abortion rate and increase child poverty.

In a report to the state and the federal Department of Health and Human Services in December, researchers from Rutgers and Princeton universities concluded that the family cap, which has been adopted by 22 other states, had a “small but nontrivial effect on abortion rates . . . over what would be expected due to trend and population composition changes.”

While the abortion rate was going up among welfare mothers by about 6%, it declined for the general population.

The report was disclosed to the National Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union by a state lawyer during routine pretrial document exchanges in a suit the groups filed against the policy. The conclusions were shared May 12 with representatives of the Catholic Church. On May 14, the state sent a nine-page letter to the researchers disputing their methodology and asking for revisions.

“The state is backing away from the findings because they don’t like the conclusions the researchers came up with,” said Martha Davis, legal director of the NOW fund. “In no way was this a draft,” she said. “It shows the real conflict when the states have a political agenda and are trying to influence this kind of research.”

But a New Jersey Department of Human Services spokeswoman sharply disputed the advocates’ conclusions. Jacqueline Tencza said: “We have a lot of concerns about the way the number was derived, because there were a lot of changes in the caseload during the period they were studying.”

A spokesman for HHS said the report is a draft “that is still being worked on.” Its $250,000 cost was paid by HHS and the Kaiser Foundation.