Let's Put a Cap on Privilege

This summer, Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick ‘78 rather surreptitiously signed a bill that nominally will cut down on welfare fraud. The practical consequences of this bill for Massachusetts’s lower-income families are severe. It will narrow the disability requirements for welfare recipients, and force women to work into their third trimester of pregnancy.

These new obstacles are only additions to an already harsh welfare program, which is funded by Temporary Aid for Needy Families, a federal block grant created in 1996. TANF is allocated to states, primarily for the purposes of funding welfare and was instituted by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. One of the components of TANF is a family cap, which financially penalizes families for having children while on TANF by refusing to provide for newer children when calculating benefits.

A common argument for family caps might go like this: non-welfare families do not get a pay raise when they have another child; hence, welfare families should not get an increase in their benefits. Sidestepping the fact that this analogy is not perfect—welfare is supposed to give people a boost out of poverty, thus by definition necessitating special steps for those receiving its benefits—argument against family caps isn’t completely accurate either.

In America, we give other social groups incentives for more children. Families not receiving Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children can be eligible for child-care vouchers.  In addition, TAFDC mothers are expected to work even into the third trimester of their pregnancy. Furthermore, welfare families face job-search requirements before they qualify for childcare and transportation subsidies.

In essence, family caps are a way of reducing reproduction based on class. It increases abortion rates for those affected, although rates of pre-coital methods of birth control remain unchanged. In addition, there are the racial consequences of family caps: the TANF reauthorization bill in 2001 noted that there was a positive correlation between a state’s African American population and its likelihood of adopt family caps.

Of course, discrimination against the poor is not a novel phenomenon. I urge you to read Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in Dandridge v. Williams, a 1970 Supreme Court case regarding Maryland’s family cap under AFDC (the precursor to TANF). Justice Marshall enumerates the reasons he believes the family cap violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Given elitist and often racial implications of the practice, continuing to impose family caps is an odd choice for a famously liberal state run by an African-American governor. If the Patrick administration is interested in cutting costs, this is not the way to do it.

There are thousands of personal reasons why someone might make the choice to have more children: people want a larger family to look after them in old age. They may have moral objections to contraception. They might believe it is their religious obligation to have more children.

Standardizing access to sex education seems a far better alternative to infringing on a woman’s personal reproductive choice. In Boston, groups such as Peer Health Exchange provide much-needed health education. One of my co-workers, who attended a public school served by PHE and later went on to teach in the program herself, said that PHE was the only comprehensive health education resource in high school. When she joined PHE in college, some of her fellow educators (predominantly upper-middle class white students) laughed at how “stupid” pregnant teens must be. What I think is “stupid” is the fact that one’s wealth determines one’s access to information about STIs and birth control.

What the proponents of a family cap have in common with those students is a patronizing ignorance about welfare families. Ignorance, because these critics lack the theory of mind to realize that some people can be raised without the same information they have access to. Fox News offers over-simplified advice to those apparently useless poor people: “Stay in school; get married before having children and stay married; work hard, save and invest.”

Racist terminology is fairly easy to catch. When it comes to class, euphemisms are rampant. Code words for the lower classes can include “uneducated” and “ignorant.” Critics of welfare families intentionally ignore the fact that wealth is linked to access to education, which in turn is linked to careers and income. Instead, they mischaracterize welfare recipients as lazy and wholly responsible for their fate.

The TAFDC family cap (as well as similar caps in other states) punishes lower-income women for exercising their reproductive freedom. Despite all the rhetoric surrounding rights to abortion and birth control, despite the anger the recent Hobby Lobby decision caused, despite the fact that we in Massachusetts consider ourselves to be liberal and progressive, we are standing by as our politicians try to prevent lower-income women from reproducing. This has to stop.

Tez M. Clark ’17, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.