James M. Jeffords: “I offered this amendment on behalf of myself, Senator Simpson, Senator Snowe and, I believe, Senator Chafee. I have not…”

“I offered this amendment on behalf of myself, Senator Simpson, Senator Snowe and, I believe, Senator Chafee. I have not had time to gather others who, I am sure, want to cosponsor it. This is an important amendment. I hope that my colleagues will listen carefully to what this does. It is an amendment with all the good intentions in the world and something that we all believe in--that we should reduce the out-of-wedlock births. It hopes to do this by giving an incentive to States to do things to try and reduce it and be rewarded if they are successful. What it does is says we shall carefully--keep track of what I say--set as a baseline the year 1995, and we will draw the baseline for each State on the number of abortions which were performed in that State and also the number of out-of- wedlock births that occur during that period of time. That might be well, but I would have to point out that such statistics do not exist in any valid form. So we will be establishing a baseline, first of all, that really we do not have any idea whether it is valid or not. Then it says that if you reduce your out-of-wedlock births by 1 percent and you do not increase your abortions, then you will be rewarded with a 5-percent increase in the amount of money you receive across the board for welfare. If you do it by 2 percent, you will get a 10 percent. That may sound good, too, but remember, to start with we do not have any baseline that we have any accuracy with.…”