Federal reforms also required states to develop welfare incentives for teenage mothers to live at home and finish high school, rather than the old policy where government would set the teen mothers up with housing and a monthly stipend.

"Utah wrote such a broad exception that (teen mothers) are exempt (from the live-at-home requirement) if they have been successfully living on their own for a year," Ziegler said. "But can you really say it is a success if they are pregnant and on welfare?"

"Utah's loopholes are just too big," she added.

Stewart, however, said that living at home is often not an option for young mothers and the goal of the policy is aimed at encouraging self-sufficiency.

Utah also scored poorly on the results of its welfare reform. Nationally, poverty is down 2 percent, but in Utah it is up 2.2 percent. That was good enough for a ranking of 50 out of 51. Still, the state's poverty rate remains well below that of the national average — with the latest U.S. census figures showing 12.7 percent of the nation's population lives in poverty, compared to Utah's rate of 10.6 percent.

Nationally, the teenage pregnancy rate dropped 8.2 percent, but in Utah, which had a lower rate to begin with, it fell only 2.9 percent.

"Utah suffers a little because it started out at a lower rate, but there were other states with low rates, like Wyoming, that fell far more," Ziegler said.

Ziegler's study looked at welfare reform primarily from the perspective of whether or not states had the policies in place that would get people off the welfare rolls and into the work force, and whether those policies were producing results.

She believes Utah's poverty and teen birth rates are symptomatic of poor policies, and without the policies it will be difficult to ever see the results.

"Work requirements are the backbone" of welfare reform, she said. "Utah's broad definitions run counter to that philosophy."

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E-mail: spang@desnews.com; amyjoi@desnews.com