Tuesday, March 17, 2009

SB 608

State Senators Wozniak, Fontana, Alloway, M. White and Boscola have introduced SB 608. The text of the bill is relatively short, the gist being:

No child or mother of a child, when applying for or receiving benefits concerning the child, shall be eligible for benefits from a State program unless the mother of the child provides to the department administering the benefits a copy of the child’s birth certificate that shows the names and Social Security numbers of the child’s father and mother.


No exceptions are listed. None. A woman who decides to continue a pregnancy conceived through a rape cannot ever receive government benefits for that child, unless the rapist is caught and she can manage to get his social security number and his name. I can think of a few other scenarios that could require an exception but that is the primary one.

My guess is that this bill is designed to prevent the children of illegal immigrants from receiving government benefits but it applies to a lot more situations than that one. The wording is very poorly thought out.

2 comments:

ACM said...

well, an unwed mother might well know who the father is, but not know his Social Security number! seems like another assault on the imaginary "welfare queen" stereotype again... dunno.l

AboveAvgJane said...

I was going for the most extreme scenario possible. But, yeah, let's see a bill requiring men to know the social security number of every women they might, within the realm of biological possibility, have had a child with.