Since the Johnson Administration’s “War on Poverty” in the 1960s, the merging of race and welfare in the public imagination has eroded support for the social safety net. Metaphorical constructs such as the “Welfare Queen” and other racialized tropes have served as cultural signposts to structure our understanding of which families should be deserving of public aid. These narratives historically have been deployed to reduce empathy and trigger resentment toward low-income mothers, who many presume to be African American. State legislators target these mothers by weaponizing racial biases under the pretext of promoting personal responsibility and protecting financial resources from so-called undeserving recipients of state aid. “Family caps” emerged in the 1990s as one approach to achieving these purported cost reduction and self-sufficiency goals. Welfare grants are typically allocated according to family size but states impose family caps in order to deny additional financial assistance to children born into families already receiving benefits. Advocates quickly initiated legal challenges to family caps because they represent a constitutionally suspect government intrusion on women’s reproductive rights and create severe penalties for already poor families.