The Future of the Family Cap: Fertility Effects 18 Years Post-Implementation

Abstract

AbstractFamily caps are the one welfare reform explicitly designed to reduce birth rates among poor, unmarried women. These policies generate a great deal of controversy due to the groups of women they target, the mechanisms through which they operate, and the effects they purport to produce. This article presents results from a national study with 18 years of post–family cap data. We find that family caps reduce nonmarital births by about 2 per 1,000 and the nonmarital birth ratio by nearly 2 per 100 and that these effects are confined primarily to states where Medicaid is used to pay for abortion and where black women form a large proportion of the population. In contrast to a number of earlier studies, our analysis also shows that most of the decline in births is due to fewer pregnancies (about 3 per 1,000) and not to increases in abortions.