Conservative scholar Lawrence Mead of Princeton thinks not. Mead's analysis bolsters people who want to resist welfare change designed to reduce welfare's role in promoting illegitimacy. In fact, welfare is not a master cause, that takes strong and resilient families and casts them instantly into despair. Rather, it is a corrosive force that hurts the most vulnerable at critical points in the life-cycle. Poverty strikes like an opportunistic infection that is most dangerous when the familial immune system has already been weakened.
Welfare dependency sets up a chain of events, particularly in the lives of susceptible young women.
At certain key junctures, especially during the time of adolescent sexuality, welfare changes the calculus of choices, both in terms of what happens and what does not happen in the life of a youth. By lessening the costs attached to unwed reproduction, choices are subsidized that interfere with future opportunity. But by increasing the benefits and reducing the burdens of a choice that is desirable on other grounds, welfare becomes a catalyst in the timing and frequency of the decision. Simply put, most people want to have children. How many children to have, and when, are decisions affected by the overall cost-benefit calculation.