lfare grants from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (Carver, Nelson 751). As a result of welfare reform law, Congress now will no longer guarantee payment of welfare grants to aid women, children and the disabled. Welfare has been placed in the hands of the state, in which they can divvy out funds as they feel fit. For example New Jersey has established the "new child exclusion act" where a child born to a woman on welfare can be excluded from receiving benefits (Jarvis 174). These restrictions make it impossible for poor women to afford preventing a pregnancy, aborting a pregnancy, or even carrying a pregnancy to term, and then raising the child. What options do these women have, what support systems can they turn to?Not only are poor, and minority women losing their right not to have children, they are also being withheld from many opportunities to have children when they can not conceive them naturally. We now live in a time of great biological technologies. Now women who are infertile have the means of having babies, for the right price. There are several "new" techniques such as hormonal treatments, artificial insemination, superovulation and IVF (Hanmer 354). These technologies are very expensive, limited to those who can pay doctors qualified. These technologies also have an extremely high failure rate, often tripling the initial cost (Hanmer 358). According to Jalna Hanmer, "restricting access is damaging to women as a group, as it creates divisions between women and reaffirms the patriarchal rule" (357). Surrogacy is another conception method that exploits the poor. In essence, the family rents out a womb of another women, with a binding contract to produce a child. Surrogacy provides another way that the working-class woman served the higher social classes (Hanmer 568). If the surrogate later decides to keep the baby, she is generally at a lost, and the baby is handed over to the purchasing family.It is difficult to pred...
