Vivian Thorp was 28 years old when she ripped a ligament in her knee lifting heavy freight at Walmart in Vallejo, California. Until then, she’d liked her job and was good at it. “I was always strong and agile, and I had the skills for a physical job,” she says. “I helped set up that store.” But when the injury laid her up, she found herself adrift in the job market. “I wasn’t skilled for anything else other than waitressing or shipping and receiving,” she says. “I got really deeply depressed.”

Her life began to unravel. A bank repossessed the rental she was living in. The father of her baby daughter Jasmine, born in 1994, left Thorp and returned to England. In 1997, four years after the accident, Walmart finally paid her $20,000 for medical expenses and lost income, but more than half of it went to pay back workers’ compensation. In debt, homeless and with a small child to support, in 1999 Thorp sought the help of California’s welfare program, CalWORKs.

She didn’t stay on welfare long; after only about a year she found a job as an office manager with a security company. But she was pregnant with her second child, conceived in a relationship with a homeless man who struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. “It wasn’t a planned pregnancy,” she says, “but it was a blessing.” Within six months, however, the owner of the security firm died, and all his employees lost their jobs. One month before she gave birth, Thorp went back on welfare: $520 a month for herself and Jasmine.

Thorp had assumed that when her second daughter, Janina, was born, her monthly cash aid payments would rise by another $122 to cover the child. This small sum might have qualified her for subsidized housing— even “Section 8 OK” apartments have income requirements. It also would have paid for diapers and a few extra groceries when food stamps ran out. She was “devastatingly shocked,” then, to learn of California’s Maximum Family Grant rule, which states that women who have babies while already on welfare may not be entitled to an increase in benefits.