Title of Dissertation: SOCIAL POLICY AND SOCIAL SERVICES IN WOMEN’S PREGNANCY DECISIONMAKING: POLITICAL AND PROGRAMMATIC IMPLICATIONS Laura Selena Hussey, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Directed By: Professor James G. Gimpel, Department of Government and Politics This dissertation empirically evaluates the argument that welfare state expansion will reduce abortion. Its central question concerns the...

An intense appetite for reforming and transforming child welfare services in the United States is yielding many new initiatives. Vulnerable children families who become involved with clearly deserve higher quality more effective services. New policies, programs, practices should be built on sound evidence. Reforms based misunderstandings about what current data show may ultimately harm families...

Public and consumer pressure for assurances that farm animals are raised humanely has led to a range of private and public animal welfare standards, and for methods to assess compliance with these standards. The standards usually claim to be science based, but even though researchers have developed measures of animal welfare and have tested the effects of housing and management variables on wel...

In fiscal year 1984, public social welfare expenditures’ reached $672.0 billion, an increase of 4.7 percent over the amount spent by Federal, State, and local governments in 1983. Measured in constant (1984) dollars, the increase was only 0.5 percent more than the previous year’s amount and was the lowest real increase since 1978-79. Public welfare spending represented 18.2 percent of the gross...