Care for the illegitimate?

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan seeks to make one point and ends trying to make two. The first is enormously important for those who have eyes to see and wish to use them. It is that a decline in the number of teenage pregnancies is not the same as a decline in the ratio of illegitimate teenage pregnancies.

Consider. In 1940, there were 54 pregnancies for every thousand teenagers. That figure climbed to 89 in 1960. It really hasn't oscillated all that much since then (1970 -- 68; 1980 -- 53; 1993 --59). But because in 1995 the figure dropped by a hair from the preceding year (from 58.9 to 56.9) the political let's-party set decided a jamboree was in order. Miss Donna Shalala of Health and Human Services trumpeted the improvement as did, of course, President Clinton.

Senator Moynihan's point is that a reduction in the per/thousand figures tells us nothing about the ratio of illegitimate teenage pregnancies. That "continues to soar. It reached 75.9 per cent in 1994. That surely should be a ceiling; and yet the ratio has reached 96.8 percent in the District of Columbia." People tend to round off figures, for convenience. Exercising that convention, one would not be far off by saying that "100 per cent" of teenagers who bear children in Washington, D.C., are unmarried.

But Sen. Moynihan proceeds to relate the bad statistics to the welfare bill. No, he is not saying that last June's welfare bill caused the incremental lovers in Washington, D.C., to scrap their application for a wedding license. He is suggesting that the situation will get worse as the result of a bill that ends the program that provided Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

The difference in competing focuses here throws interesting light on conservative and liberal approaches to social problems. Senator Moynihan is saying: Look, the ratio of illegitimate births is soaring, and continues to soar. What must therefore be done is to continue to provide federal benefits to the one-parent family and above all to give more and better schooling to their children. The planted axiom is that the illegitimacy ratio will continue high and therefore we must cope with it even as, with the arrival of winter, one needs to cope with the cold.

But of course there is another approach. It is that, preeminently, of Charles Murray. In his book Losing Ground he made a case for discouraging the birth of illegitimate children by depriving the mother of guaranteed income. The June welfare act does not repeal aid to dependent children, it assigns increasing responsibility for the amount of such aid and the conditions under which it is disbursed, to the states. If Mr. Murray is correct, and he is persuasive, the factor of financial aid has direct bearing on the incidence of illegitimate childbirth.

Consider the figures. The illegitimacy rate in 1940 was 7.1 per thousand births to unmarried females; 14.1 in 1950. When effusive welfare began in 1965, it was at 23.5. In 1975, it was 24.8. By 1993, it had increased to 45.3.

In the District of Columbia we have only the relief that in the nature of things it can't really get higher. After 100 per cent, you meet absolute statistical resistance: It can't get worse.

The case is made by the Cato Institute that the dole is also responsible for the abandonment by business of the inner cities, one cause of which is the difficulty in finding men and women who will take such jobs as are offered. A Cato study notes that under present law a welfare mother in Hawaii with two children could receive as much as $36,400 a year in assistance, which is the equivalent of $l7.50 an hour; more than three times the minimum wage. The study notes that welfare exceeds l50 per cent of the poverty level in 21 states, paying more than the national average salary of a secretary in 29 states, and outpaying teachers in nine states and computer programmers in six states. In 46 states, welfare recipients get the equivalent of $7.16 an hour or more.

The states, then, are not out of step with the welfare Weltanschauung of the last two generations. But under the welfare bill of June, they will have a chance to reconsider the options, primary among them that it would be better to reduce illegitimacy than to subsidize it.

COPYRIGHT 1997 National Review, Inc.
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