Welfare Buys Illegitimacy
By Ron Haskins

Seldom has social science produced economic and social statistics starker than those applying today to children born out of wedlock. The poverty rate for children in families headed by a never-married mother is eight times that of children in two-parent families. Youngsters from never-married families are far likelier to fail in school, to commit crimes, to be unhealthy, to be unemployed as adults, to become welfare cases.

In response to these grim figures, Republicans have proposed reductions in the welfare payments that are widely presumed to be feeding the post-1960s burst of illegitimacy (consider: seven out of ten black children are now born out of wedlock). The Republican welfare reform bill of 1995, twice vetoed by President Clinton, provided financial rewards for states that reduce their illegitimacy rates without increasing abortion, required the administration to formulate a plan for reducing illegitimacy, set up programs to induce teens to abstain from sex, required teen mothers to live at home, required states to design programs to curb illegitimacy, and prohibited states from using federal dollars to increase payments to unmarried mothers already on welfare if they have an additional baby. Remarkably, a majority of Senate Democrats supported most of these policies.

But the centerpiece and most controversial aspect of the new conservative anti-illegitimacy policy was the proposal to stop paying cash to unwed minor mothers. Instead of giving teen mothers cash to set up their own household, conservatives proposed, the teenager should stay in the home of her parents with the newborn, or she should be directed to a supervised group home, or the baby should be adopted into a loving family on an adoption waiting list. Trying to help poor children by giving their underage mothers cash will often simply produce more poor children, reformers argued. Wise societies don’t reward births outside marriage in this way.

But of course liberals deny the supposition that financially rewarding illegitimacy increases its frequency. So the question was tested. Since the 1970s, more than 20 studies have been conducted to determine whether cash welfare is associated with increased rates of nonmarital births. As this literature accumulated, it turned out that nearly three-quarters of the studies found statistically significant evidence that welfare generosity was associated with increased illegitimacy. But the evidence was not always strong, so for more than two decades academic social scientists, a very liberal group, dodged, explained away, and otherwise resisted this conclusion.

In June of 1994, a group of more than 70 prominent social scientists actually took the unusual step of releasing a signed statement at a Washington, D.C. press conference to "dispute the contention that welfare is [a] major cause of out-of-wedlock births." Organized by University of Michigan professor Sheldon Danziger, the group was reacting to rising intellectual and political sentiment in favor of curbing welfare payments to young mothers in an attempt to rein in the illegitimacy explosion.

In the midst of this academic fight, the National Academy of Sciences decided to sponsor some new research. A conference was held in Washington, D.C., in April of this year to discuss the resulting papers. The most remarkable one was written by professor Mark Rosenzweig of the University of Pennsylvania. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, he examined the marriage and fertility decisions of women ages 14 to 22, carefully factoring in such factors as intelligence, race, parents’ schooling, number of siblings, parental earnings, and the level of local welfare benefits.

The results were unambiguous: Among all women, a small correlation exists between the level of welfare benefits and the probability of nonmarital childbearing. Among women in low-income families, the effect is large. In fact, Rosenzweig’s equations show that among low-income women (under $10,000 annual income), a 10 percent rise in welfare benefits causes a 12 percent jump in illegitimate births.

Rosenzweig’s study is both the most sophisticated yet conducted on this subject and the most damning on the welfare-illegitimacy link. To the extent that conflicts among social scientists can resemble sporting events, his recent oral summary of his study to a skeptical group of social scientists at the National Academy thus became a hot ticket. A flurry of arrows were launched in Rosenzweig’s direction, but he was more than up to the task. In the end, Sara McLanahan, a well-respected scientist and signer of the 1994 Danziger letter, admonished the audience that Rosenzweig’s work was first rate, that he made a solid presentation, and that all had better "pay attention" to his findings.

In an intellectually honest world, groups of welfare acad-emics would now be signing letters and holding news conferences noting that "evidence is growing that welfare cuts may reduce out-of-wedlock birthrates." In the guarded language preferred by social scientists, that statement now reflects the best evidence available.

Of course, that is what the evidence has been saying since at least the late 1980s. Some day even the welfare intelligentsia may recognize that.

Ron Haskins, a staff director on the House Ways and Means Committee, participated in the National Academy of Sciences conference.