Race, Gender, and Welfare Reform: The Antinatalist Response

Abstract

To be a woman, poor and fertile, in the United States in the 1990s is to be blamed by politicians and social reformers for an increase in poverty and alleged immorality in society. Poor women, it is said or implied, are bearing children for the purpose of obtaining or supplementing a welfare check. They are sexually out of control and are the cause of their own poverty (Murray, 1994; Wilson, 1995). The proof of their degeneracy and immorality is evidenced by their entrapment in a spreading culture of single motherhood (Kaus, 1986, p. 28): excessive sexuality, expressed in nonmarital pregnancy and childbirth; changing family patterns,1 represented by woman-headed families; and welfare dependence,2 incorrectly believed to encourage nonmarital births and family breakdown. Critics particularly underscore the fertility problem among women in poverty that lies either in nonmarital births or imprudent procreation within marriage. In neither case can poor women afford their babies. Political elites argue that childbearing for the married poor should be delayed until the couple saves enough money to support that child. For single women, childbearing should be altogether delayed until marriage. Nonmarital childbearing among the poor is thought to produce troubled children who will likely

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