Medicaid policy in some states actually instructed doctors to remove Norplant only in cases of medical necessity. And many, many poor women, like Thomas, sensed that doctors and family planning workers were imposing their own opinion that their patients needed Norplant because they should not be having children and weren't responsible enough to use other contraceptives. Within two years 13 state legislatures proposed some 20 measures to implant poor women with Norplant. Some of these bills proposed pressuring women on welfare to use the device either by offering them a financial bonus or by requiring implantation as a condition of receiving benefits. Kansas Republican state representative Kerry Patrick, for example, touted his plan to pay welfare mothers to use Norplant as having the potential to save the taxpayers millions of their hard-earned dollars by reducing the number of children on the welfare rolls.
Family caps deny additional payments for children born to women who are already receiving welfare.
This meant that C.K. and other welfare mothers continued to receive the same amount of assistance even after they gave birth to another child. One of the plaintiffs had been a mother of two when she gave birth to triplets, and was now trying to raise five children on the same monthly check. The 1996 federal welfare reform law permits states to enact child exclusion laws and many states have done so. The federal district court judge who heard the case rejected C.K.'s argument that the law violated women's procreative rights, pointing out that the state of New Jersey was under no obligation to fund its citizens' reproductive decisions. He cited as precedent United States Supreme Court cases that deny public assistance for abortion.