Panel Rebuffs Welfare Mothers’ Input

WASHINGTON —  To Lisa Sanderson, congressional hearings on welfare reform feature too many dark-suited, well-fed men expounding on the moral, financial and cultural wrongs that need to be righted--and too few welfare recipients talking about what they need to become independent.

So Sanderson, 26, climbed into a van with two other Massachussets welfare mothers and drove all night to Washington, determined to seek an audience before the House Ways and Means human resources subcommittee when it resumed its hearings Friday.

As official witnesses bemoaned the tragedy of unwed motherhood and the need to re-establish the traditional stigma of illegitimacy, the road-weary women stood up and asked to speak even though they were not on the list of witnesses.

“The people not being heard are the people on AFDC,” one of the women boomed in a reference to the largest category of welfare, Aid to Families With Dependent Children. “We need to be here. We need to testify.”

But subcommittee Chairman E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) asked the three women to leave. They refused. He summoned a guard, who removed them.

Besides providing a moment of high drama to the proceedings, the scene underscored the concerns of welfare recipients who believe that they are being left out while politicians move to dismantle the safety net that many credit with saving them and their children from destitution.

Rep. Harold E. Ford (D-Tenn.) chided Shaw for inviting three male witnesses to talk about an issue that “women are faced with in our society” and then evicting three women who came to do just that.

Shaw, however, had invited two women who represented welfare success stories to testify later in the day.

One of them, Amy Hendricks, 25, of Temple Hills, Md., explained that she went on welfare three years ago after having a son out of wedlock. She testified that she will complete community college soon and that she plans to attend the University of Maryland.

Asked by Ford whether she could have done this under the GOP plan, which would have cut her off after two years, she said: “I don’t think so.”

House Republicans have proposed radically reforming the welfare system by cutting people off public assistance rolls after two years and by denying cash benefits to mothers under 18 as a way to discourage out-of-wedlock births.

Sanderson said in an interview after being escorted from the hearing that she was particularly offended by the testimony Friday of William J. Bennett, the former secretary of education, who called on Americans to start using the term illegitimacy again so that a decision to have babies out of marriage would be considered a “serious social pathology.”

Currently, 30% of American children are born to single mothers. While 22% of all children lived in poverty in 1993, 64% of children living with never-married mothers lived in poverty.

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In Sanderson’s view, the children of many women on welfare are better off without their fathers in their lives. The father of her baby, she said, is an alcoholic and drug abuser who left her two months before her baby was born after living with her for four years. She has received welfare for two years while living in one room in a boarding house and caring for her now 2-year-old daughter, Amanda.

She has a job lined up but worries that, given the new get-tough mood in Washington, Congress will not help welfare recipients become self-sufficient.

“They need to talk to us to see what we need,” Sanderson said as she fielded questions from journalists. And that is subsidized child care, affordable housing, health care coverage and child support from the “deadbeat dads,” she said.

She said that she had called Congress for months requesting a chance to testify--to no avail.