The Washington, D.C., policy research group the Urban Institute convened a roundtable on July 25, 2006, to mark the 10th anniversary of welfare reform. At the event, experts with varied views acknowledged the watershed transformation of public assistance for very poor people and offered suggestions to further promote well-being for the economically vulnerable.

Read a short primer on poverty statistics from the federal government.

The Office of Family Assistance in the Administration for Children and Families (within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) administers welfare and keeps statistics.

Fortunate Families is an organization for Catholic families with LGBT sons and daughters. It is primarily for parents but has resources for getting youth to talk about their sexuality with their parents. It is based in Rochester, N.Y.

Malcolm Potts is an obstetrician and reproductive scientist and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has studied oral contraceptives since the 1960s and says the Catholic Church needs to recognize the health benefits – aside from contraception – of the birth control pill.

Thomas A. Cavanaugh is a philosophy professor at the University of San Francisco and one of nearly 100 scholars nationwide who signed a letter denouncing Obama’s contraception coverage mandate.

Cole Durham is Emeritus Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, where he held the Susa Young Gates University Professorship. He is founding Director of the Law School’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies. From its official organization on January 1, 2000, until May 1, 2016, Professor […]

Cristina Traina is a religion professor at Northwestern University in Chicago whose work in Christian theology and ethics includes an emphasis on Roman Catholic and feminist thought.  She has written about her experiences as a married Catholic woman dealing with church teachings on artificial contraception.

Gloria Albrecht
 is professor emerita of religion and ethics at the University of Detroit Mercy. She wrote a chapter on contraception and abortion within Protestant Christianity for the book Sacred Rights: The Case for Contraception and Abortion in World Religions.