Gop Must Show Cuts Are Pro-Child

Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala was first out of the blocks, telling me weeks ago that she thinks the Republican ideas for welfare reform are “mean.” Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, chimed in at a Capitol Hill rally over the weekend that the proposals are “unfair.”

Republicans understandably bristle at such rhetoric, but the Democrats are sincere. They really believe it is kindness to hand able-bodied people checks, demanding nothing in return. They call the current system - which keeps millions of people in a permanent state of listless dependency and dooms hundreds of thousands of children to languish in foster care - compassionate. Of the families now on welfare, 65 percent still will be on the rolls in eight years.

If that is compassion, then what we need is some tough-mindedness.

Nor should Republicans shrink from making an explicit pro-child argument for their reforms. The whole point of welfare reform is to ensure that fewer and fewer children will have to grow up in the arid, stultifying culture of dependency that liberal compassion has created. As Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., chairman of the subcommittee that drafted the welfare reform bill, told me, “We are satisfied to have our compassion judged by how many people we remove from the welfare rolls.”

The Republican welfare reform proposal takes aim at the heart of the welfare problem - the single woman who becomes welfare-dependent upon conceiving an out-of-wedlock child. The bill would deny benefits to girls under the age of 18 who have illegitimate children. It also would withhold any increased benefits to a woman who conceives another child while she is on welfare. Working Americans cannot expect a raise if they get pregnant; neither should welfare recipients.

The bill also would cut off benefits after two years if recipients decline to work.

Democrats indignantly insist that women don’t become pregnant to get welfare. Denying them benefits, they argue, is mean-spirited.

But the experience of the state of New Jersey, which instituted the no-extra-cash-for-a-new-baby rule two years ago, is that the number of new babies born to welfare mothers has declined. Women may not conceive children exclusively to receive extra payments from the government, but the lack of those extra payments certainly would give them pause if they are contemplating having babies they cannot support. The government check has been, in pop psychology argot, the “enabler” for irresponsible conduct.

The stepchild of the current welfare system is the scandalous child-welfare bureaucracy. The massive increase in illegitimate childbearing which the welfare system has subsidized has spawned a devastating explosion in the number of abused and neglected children. Social services nationwide are overburdened by the caseload. But they also are burdened by liberal thinking.

Most child-welfare agencies in the United States (as well as the Clinton administration) either formally or informally are committed to the philosophy of “family preservation,” which holds that a child is always best off with his or her biological parents. Accordingly, even children who have been severely abused and/or neglected by their parents - even children whose bones have been broken and whose skin has been burned - are returned to their “families” after some wellintentioned “intervention” from a social worker.

The Republican reform proposal, however, recognizes “family preservation” for the folly that it is. The biological family is not always the best place for the child. It is a far greater kindness to place that child with loving adoptive parents than to give his or her abusive mother a dozen second chances.

The Republican reform calls for creation of citizen review panels to monitor the states’ handling of abuse and neglect cases. That provision is likely to be overlooked in all the shouting about unwed pregnancy, but it has the potential to save the lives of thousands of miserable children. I gladly would serve on such a panel, and I bet that no state would lack for volunteers.

If the Republicans fail to pass every other provision of their “Contract With America” but succeed in passing this, the 1994 elections would be more than justified.

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