Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

On August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law a “sweeping welfare reform” bill that “ended the New Deal guarantee of cash assistance for American children living in poverty” (191). The new law—which placed more authority with the states to run Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—established a five-year limit on payments and required the heads of households to find employment within two years. The reform law fulfilled Clinton’s promise to end welfare as the country had known it, just in time for his 1996 campaign for a second term. Welfare, which had long been a form of charity, became “a means of modifying poor people’s behavior” (191). One of the “pathologies” that reformers sought to curtail was the birthrate among welfare mothers, most of whom the public presumed were Black. When Clinton signed the law, the US welfare system was already exceptionally stingy and limited. Moreover, the reform came shortly after the defeat of Clinton’s universal healthcare insurance proposal.

Before the modern welfare system, “state and local programs” (192) funded “mother’s pensions.” Women reformers in the early 20th century convinced the public that single motherhood was a social problem that a welfare safety net could best address. This was to ensure that women who had experienced misfortune or whose circumstances resulted from male irresponsibility wouldn’t have to give up their domestic duties and join the workforce. The reformers “limited the programs’ generosity,” however, afraid that dependence on public assistance would lead to “moral degeneracy and family breakdown” (193).

Maternal welfare programs effectively excluded Black mothers—even in the North, where European immigrant women qualified. Additionally, ideological differences existed between Black and white women about motherhood. First, Black women accepted that married women often had to work and, therefore, sought assistance for working mothers. Second, white reformers romanticized mothers as emblems of chastity and goodness, while Black reformers emphasized the value of domestic labor. For example, Black women activists made homemakers eligible for membership in the National Association of Wage Earners.

When New Deal legislators set up the federal welfare system, Northern Democrats brokered with Southern party members to deny Black people eligibility. States could define eligibility standards that “excluded agricultural workers and domestic servants in a deliberate effort to maintain a Black menial labor class in the South” (195). Additionally, New Deal public programs discriminated against Black people, offering them only the most menial work and sometimes paying them half of what white employees made.

In the 1960s, the efforts of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty expanded welfare eligibility and entitlement. However, by this decade, public aid programs had become stingier. As AFDC became associated more in the public eye with Black mothers, already perceived as overly fertile and irresponsible, the program became bogged down with “modification rules, work requirements, and reduced effective benefit levels” (196). The image of the welfare mother as a virtuous yet downtrodden white women shifted to that of “the immoral Black welfare queen” (196).

Meanwhile, the welfare system never created jobs or eliminated barriers to full-time employment. Instead, the primary goal of many welfare reformers was to reduce the birthrate among women receiving welfare benefits. Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich led this charge. He also proposed taking benefits away from mothers receiving welfare and diverting the funds to adoption programs or orphanages.

Other states have set up family caps. New Jersey was the first state to establish a child exclusion law—"a five-year experimental project” that eliminated benefits “for a child born to a woman who already has two children” (199). Legislators hoped that the measure would help break the cycle of poverty among welfare recipients—and discourage welfare mothers from having more children. New Jersey’s anti-choice groups opposed the measure, holding that it would increase the state’s rate of abortions. Indeed, eight months after the family cap began, “abortions increased by about 300 over the preceding year, while the national abortion rate decreased slightly” (200). Some women claimed that the law caused them to terminate pregnancies they would have preferred to carry to term.

Roberts reasons that those who relied on AFDC were already living in poverty. Additional benefits for another baby only allowed them enough money for the new child to survive. Conversely, working families received numerous government benefits, including tax credits and exemptions, to subsidize the costs of raising multiple children.

In previous years, legislators were open about their racism when trying to curtail the fertility of women on welfare. In 1958, Mississippi state representative David H. Glass introduced a bill to mandate the sterilization of unwed women who gave birth to children. He focused on the overwhelming number of Black children born to unmarried couples. To those like Glass, Black people—no longer a source of cheap labor—had become a welfare burden. He wondered how much longer the taxpayers of Mississippi were to pay “for the benefit of a race, and a nation, which show[ed] no appreciation for their sacrifice” (202).

Congress tailored its welfare reforms to address perceived problems within Black communities. Newt Gingrich blamed poverty among Black people on laziness. Charles Murray argued in 1984 that “welfare induces poor women to have babies” (204). Nine years later, he claimed that illegitimacy was the nation’s most critical social problem. The next year, Murray purported that the “higher fertility rates of groups with lower average intelligence […] help[ed] to perpetuate welfare dependency” (204). Murray’s ideas, once regarded as fringe, had become mainstream by the mid-1990s.

Roberts outlines the myths about welfare recipients—and how the public came to accept such myths. The first myth is that welfare benefits encourage women to have children. Former North Carolina Republican senator Lauch Faircloth reasoned that while middle-class families financially prepare for children, those who end up on welfare do so with the belief that the federal government will care for their children. Studies, however, “have found no significant causal relationship between welfare recipients and childbearing” (206). Most mothers on welfare have only one or two children, and the size of a family on AFDC declined from the 1970s to the 1990s.

A second myth is that AFDC causes financial dependence. Conservatives claim that this, and not poverty, is the root of myriad social ills. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas publicly derided his own sister, Emma Mae Martin, claiming that she and her children were dependent on welfare and lacked motivation for getting off it. In fact, Martin had worked two minimum-wage jobs while Thomas attended law school and stopped working for several years to care for an elderly aunt recovering from a stroke. By the time of Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court, both Martin and her eldest child were working.

Welfare rights advocate and former recipient Theresa Funicello asserts that the main difference between “survivor” families—that is, those who receive Social Security benefits—and “welfare” families is the relationship that the women and children in the former have to a man. Roberts elaborates and reminds us that “survivor” families are also likelier to be white, while “welfare” families are likelier to be Black. In addition, Social Security is regarded as an insurance program. Its beneficiaries are recouping what they contributed to the program, which spares them the stigma that welfare families face. Although some rail against welfare for excessive revenue expenditures, AFDC accounts for less than 4% of social welfare spending.

The welfare dependency myth promotes the opinion that taxpayers wouldn’t need to support poor children if their parents would simply find work. Since 1971, Congress has required mothers who benefit from AFDC to enroll in work programs, and several states have pushed beneficiaries to find employment by ending benefits after two years. Similarly, the 1996 welfare reform law mandated that welfare recipients find employment within two years. However, most welfare beneficiaries work while receiving welfare. When they don’t, it’s usually due to poor wages, inadequate childcare, or other adverse conditions. Also, not enough full-time jobs exist to employ all welfare recipients.

A third myth is that marriage is the solution to child poverty. While families headed by single mothers are poorer than families in which an adult male is present, this correlation isn’t proof that single motherhood causes poverty—and doesn’t predict that marriage or paternal support will ensure that children never endure poverty. Rather, children’s poverty results from inadequate family income. Advocates for women who have experienced domestic violence argue that welfare cuts will make women more likely to remain in violent homes. The myth about marriage encourages women’s economic dependence on men and overlooks the fact that many Black mothers have never been married. While many white mothers are impoverished due to divorce, Black single moms were often poor already. Black children living with two parents are still likelier to be poor than white children in households headed by single moms. As for child support, this is pointless if the father is low-income or long unemployed. Finally, the higher incarceration rate among Black men makes it harder for them to find employment.

Myths about women on welfare have allowed the government to surveil their lives in ways that wouldn’t find public support in other circumstances. In the 1990s, the federal government allowed states to change their welfare programs to allow for behavior modification requirements. If recipients fail to retain employment, have children out of wedlock, or are unable to prevent their children from dropping out of school, they may lose benefits. In addition, mothers on welfare must allow caseworkers to search their homes.

The Supreme Court has permitted most such incursions on welfare mothers’ privacy. A caseworker need not get judicial approval before conducting home inspections. Some states have required mothers on welfare “to undergo mandatory paternity proceedings,” and the Supreme Court has supported this pressure “in establishing the paternity of their children and tracking down the father” (215). Arkansas permits an exclusion to this policy if the mother can prove that the child’s conception resulted from rape.

As for abortion helping low-income women avoid these intrusions altogether, the federal government has ceased to pay for abortions. Pregnant women may receive Medicaid funds but are barred from using those benefits to obtain abortions. In Maher v. Roe, the Supreme Court upheld a Connecticut law that “denied public funding for abortions that were not medically necessary” (217), though the state did pay for expenses incurred during childbirth. The passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1977 ended federal funding for abortions and left any funding for the procedure up to states. At the time of this book’s publication, the Hyde Amendment allowed Medicaid to cover abortions only when a mother’s life was endangered by a pregnancy or if the pregnancy resulted from rape. The Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment’s constitutionality in its decision on Harris v. McRae, in which the Court denied that a woman’s freedom of reproductive choice entitled her to government funding for an abortion.

In addition to denying poor women funds for abortion, the Supreme Court upheld a ban on abortion counseling in federally funded clinics in Rust v. Sullivan. When Congress enacted Title X of the Public Service Act in 1970, its purpose was to give millions of low-income women an avenue to receive reproductive health services. In 1988, the Reagan administration prohibited family-planning clinics that received Title X funds from educating their patients about abortion. Clinic workers couldn’t legally refer patients to abortion providers or tell them where to get abortion information. President Clinton repealed the regulations shortly after his election, appropriately on the 20th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. However, the damage was already done. Low-income women received referrals to doctors who were geographically and financially out of their reach, causing them to delay treatment. They sometimes turned to unlicensed doctors and poorly run clinics to get abortion services. Also, while white women are likelier to seek healthcare from those of their race and economic background, Black women face more impersonal healthcare services. Given all these barriers to getting an abortion, more Black women are likely to “turn to long-acting contraceptives and sterilization” (221).

For many years, debate on the federal funding of reproductive choices has centered on abortion. In the 1990s, the “new welfare laws raise[d] the question [of] whether the government is obligated to support the decision to have a child” (223). In 1994, a handful of New Jersey welfare recipients filed a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), challenging its sponsorship of the Family Development Act. Two plaintiffs had become pregnant through rape and decided to maintain their pregnancies. One plaintiff was a mother of two and became pregnant a third time, giving birth to triplets, yet had to subsist on the same monthly stipend. Another, a Roman Catholic, held that the cap coerced her to have an abortion.

The judge presiding over the case, Nicolas H. Politan, believed in the state’s experiment to reform its welfare system. Politan reasoned that the children weren’t excluded from the funding but that the family simply had to do a better job of sharing. He used a 1970 Supreme Court precedent, Dandridge v. Williams, to declare that the New Jersey provision merely imposed a ceiling on AFDC benefits. He held that the cap was just in that it “promot[ed] individual responsibility and stabiliz[ed] family structure” (225). Besides, he continued, the recipient families were better off with the cap than they would be if the state discontinued its welfare program altogether. Judge Politan dismissed the lawsuit.

Roberts asserts that the benefit caps “reduce welfare benefits needed for survival to penalize protected reproductive decisions the government disapproves” (225). Because the law excludes only children born while a family is on welfare, it doesn’t discourage having a large family but does discourage having children while receiving benefits.

Roberts ponders whether the child exclusion law is distinguishable from laws that ban government funding of abortions given that both are ways to manipulate “poor women’s reproductive decisionmaking [sic]” (225-26). She asserts that the court’s interest in supporting both laws is contradictory and that regarding the “denial of the new birth benefit as inaction” (226) makes little sense, as the government continues to pay AFDC funds to millions of poor families (226). Roberts posits that the penalty that family caps enforce is “more burdensome than that imposed by abortion funding laws” (227). The funding limits make it more difficult to obtain food, clothing, and shelter for an additional child.

Roberts wonders why Americans believe in myths about welfare—and why they barely support a system that leaves millions of children living below the poverty line. The common explanation is that the nation’s reverence for individualism, its distrust of government power, and its emphasis on private property as a means of achieving wealth influence public opinion. Roberts insists that white Americans historically have been eager to embrace social insurance programs that exclude Black people. Programs that benefit Black people and aid in their social advancement diminish white supremacy. Many white people are averse to supporting programs that facilitate Black people’s full social participation, even if those programs also support white people. Roberts notes that “[e]ven white workers’ and feminist movements have compromised their most radical dreams in order to strike political bargains that sacrifice the rights of Blacks” (229).