This article is from the archive of our partner .
Ann Romney sounded very openminded in her well-received speech about being a stay-at-home mom Monday night, saying she was happy the response to April's mommy wars showed "that women have choices in life and some choices are not all the same, but that we value everyone’s choice in making their profession," Politico's Maggie Haberman reports. But Romney hasn't always been so supportive of the choices of all women. In an infamous interview with The Boston Globe, published October 20, 1994, Romney explained how her husband, then running for Senate in Massachusetts, would reach out to poor people through welfare reform. "And you know, we shouldn't incent all the wrong behaviors," Romney said. "Right now, what we're doing is incenting young girls to leave home, to not marry the person they're, you know, having a child with because they won't get the welfare check if they're married, if they're living with a man."
In fairness, the early 1990s was a time when the country was in a panic over single moms -- Newt Gingrich proposed creating orphanages to take babies from teen mothers to cut back on welfare rolls. Nevertheless, Romney's judgment was a little harsh: "It's totally insane. So, you've got to incent people to behave in a more appropriate pattern to break the cycle of really inappropriate... and life is so precious, you just don't want to cheat these children out of their potential. And they know -- what are the statistics? Ninety percent of children from single-parent homes who grow up in poverty will stay in poverty because they don't have a bridge out of it."