The Storm Over Orphanages

adoption" -- but not with the cash that might keep mother and child together. Orphanages were not the subject of Gingrich's speech, but they were not a throwaway either. The notion reappeared in the Republican welfare-reform bill (with the inflammatory word orphanages changed to "children's homes"), which is a basis for Gingrich's famous "Contract with America."

It was not a smart move. The news media were quick to note the orphanage proposal's obvious incompatibility with "family values." Hillary Clinton told a New York audience last week that the "idea of putting children into orphanages because their mothers couldn't find jobs" was "unbelievable and absurd." Eager to be seen as the way of the future, the Newtonians found themselves tarred with images of the distant, Dickensian past.

Many Republicans were loath even to repeat the dread word. So it was left to a lowly House staff member who handles welfare policy for the Republican conference to deliver its likely epitaph. Were Republican lawmakers serious about the orphanage option? "If they were, they have buttoned their lips. This thing has been mercilessly crucified," he says. "I would not be surprised if they strike the provision from the bill, because it's given us so much grief."

Nearly everyone agrees that illegitimacy and teen pregnancy are key elements in poverty's vicious cycle and that the government should try to reduce them. Gingrich's orphanage proposal, however, seems punitive -- not to mention odd, coming from a man who was born to a 16-year-old mother eight months after she left his abusive father. It would violate federal law, which mandates family- based care over institutions, and ignore the public policy consensus -- first expressed by the Teddy Roosevelt White House -- that "no child should be deprived of his family by reason of poverty alone."

It would also be a budget buster. According to an analysis done for TIME by the Child Welfare League of America, the annual welfare cost of one child living with his or her mother is $2,644. The same child living with a foster family costs the public $4,800 a year. The average cost for the child's care in "residential group care," today's closest approximation of an orphanage, is $36,500. If even a quarter of an estimated 1 million children who would be cut loose under Gingrich's plan ended up in orphanages, the additional cost to & the public would be more than $8 billion.

That said, however, Gingrich perhaps inadvertently stumbled into a contentious ongoing debate among child-welfare experts about "congregate care." The wrangle is not about whether half a million mothers who may love their children should be forced to give them up to institutions. It is about the half a million children already in the system, whose parents are either dead or have proved themselves abusive or negligent, and whether orphanages should be used to supplement foster placements that don't work out. "Orphanages" proper have been out of vogue for so long that it is hard today to locate a building with "orphanage" in its name. However, a small but growing number of social scientists and social-welfare professionals has been advocating their return. And in so doing, they have broached a disturbing question: Have America's attempts to find families for its abandoned and damaged children failed so badly that some institutionalization looks good?