Republicans, States Show Little Interest In Orphanage Plan

WASHINGTON - Whatever Republicans do to reform the welfare system, it isn't likely to result in state-run orphanages for the children of unwed teenage mothers.

States are not clamoring to get back into the orphanage business. And the suggestion, recently championed by incoming Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, has become something of an embarrassment to the Republican Party.

"We're thinking about just taking orphanages out of the bill," said Robert Rector, a welfare expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, who is helping draft the legislation.

More likely to be debated is a proposal for more group homes where young mothers could live with their children while finishing school or getting job training.

That concept, first proposed by conservative Republicans, was recently endorsed by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a group of moderate and conservative "New Democrats."

Gingrich, of Georgia, has consistently defended orphanages from critics, including first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. She should rent "Boys Town," the 1938 film about the famous Nebraska orphanage, before criticizing the idea, Gingrich said.

But other top Republicans have not lined up behind Gingrich.

"I don't know where that came from," Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate and a Gingrich ally, said about the orphanage idea. "This is not something I want to see or even bring up."

"A lot of us don't think the federal government should be in the business of breaking up families," said Rep. Nancy Johnson, R-Conn., a key figure in the welfare-reform debate.

The orphanage language was included in the House GOP Contract with America - a document about GOP priorities - as an option for how states could use federal money denied to unwed mothers up to age 21. Other uses would include the group homes, expansion of adoption programs and prevention programs.

CRITICS LIKE ORPHANAGE IMAGE

States could still provide cash assistance to these mothers under the proposal. But the image of orphanages gave critics a vivid way to illustrate what they considered the meanness in any plan to deny cash benefits to needy families.

"The Republican Party did not want to be known as the party of orphanages," said David Liederman, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America, a coalition of 800 social-service agencies. "It was a poorly conceived idea designed to play to all the negative feelings people have about people on welfare."

But Rector said the nation needs to attack the problem that nearly half of babies are born to unwed mothers.

"What liberals did was seize on orphanages as a way of terrorizing people, and Gingrich helped them by publicizing it," said Rector, who helped draft the legislation. "But the bottom line is that a single mother on welfare in public housing is one of the worst possible situations to raise a child in."

Just how the orphanage idea would work has not been researched. All the details - such as cost, under what circumstances a child would be taken in and how long the child must stay - would be worked out by any state that wanted to do it.

That's unlikely at a time when child-welfare officials now aim to keep even troubled families together.

GOVERNORS WANT FLEXIBILITY

"Governors want more flexibility to run welfare programs in a way that would work best in their states," said Page Boinest, spokeswoman for the National Governors Association. "But orphanages have not been on the top of the lists of reforms," he said.

Republican governors who met in Williamsburg, Va., last month endorsed a document expressing concern that denying benefits to teenage mothers "would saddle the states with billions of dollars in new costs."

The states also have not placed any priority on group homes. But that picked up momentum when the DLC's Public Policy Institute unveiled a plan that included the idea for community-based "second chance" homes for young mothers and their children.

Unlike the GOP plan, these homes would be run by churches, community groups and charities. Like the GOP plan, the money would come from cash benefits that would have gone to the teenagers. The DLC plan would allow teenage mothers to keep some benefits.

Under the Clinton plan, teenage mothers would still get benefits but would be required to live with an adult and to go to work after two years.

Kathleen Sylvester, author of the DLC plan, called her version a middle ground between hand holding and punishment. "Teen mothers grow up so fast when they have those babies, and they want to be good mothers. But they have no one to help them," she said. "Some of them need mothers themselves."