AUGUSTA — Republicans in the Legislature on Thursday advocated replacing Maine’s central welfare program with a system that would require poor people to work to qualify for cash payments that would be cut off after six months.

“It’s not for us a war against poverty. People can be poor and still be self-sufficient,” said Sen. Joan M. Pendexter, R-Scarborough, who co-chairs the Human Resources Committee.

The proposal, which the committee will review along with competing welfare-reform plans from Gov. Angus King and others later this month, would replace the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program in Maine with a new “employment security” program.

Future welfare recipients who are healthy, are 18 or older and have children who are at least 3 months old would have to work, perform community service or be enrolled in an educational program for at least 20 hours a week to qualify for benefits. In addition to cash payments, an array of support services, including child care, medical assistance, food stamps and transportation would be available to the mostly female recipients.

The cash payments would end after 26 weeks, even if the recipient has not found a job that pays enough to live on, although the support services would remain available for two years to those who need them, Pendexter said.

“I don’t feel we need to expend money to support a dependency on government,” she added.

Recipients would also face a number of new restrictions: They would have to pick up their checks in person at their town or city hall. They would not receive any additional cash payment for children born while they are receiving assistance. The paternity of recipients’ children would have to be established within six months or they would be dropped from the program.

“If Congress approves the block grant approach to federal funding for traditional human services programs, this proposal puts Maine in a good position to set priorities and have a structure in place,” Senate President Jeffrey Butland, R-Cumberland, said in a prepared statement.

Democrats and advocates for women were swift to criticize the GOP plan.

“It’s really a mean-spirited proposal,” said Rep. Michael J. Fitzpatrick, D-Durham, Pendexter’s House counterpart on the committee.

“One of the most outrageous things I have ever seen,” said Laura Fortman, a lobbyist for the Maine Women’s Lobby.

Fitzpatrick said the goal of welfare reform is to help recipients build the skills necessary to become self-sufficient and stay off welfare.

“It makes little sense to put people on the third shift … without day care (for their children) and without transportation and assume that they’ll stay off the welfare system,” he said.

Fortman said the Republican package is designed to inflame public opinion and reinforce stereotypes of welfare mothers. She singled out the plan to make recipients pick up their checks at town hall as particularly offensive.

“That is obviously an attempt just to humiliate people,” she said.

A survey of nearly 1,000 Maine welfare recipients that Fortman’s group released earlier this year found that most of them want to work and did not grow up in welfare families.

Currently, 21,000 Maine households rely on AFDC, and more than half are enrolled in the Aspire welfare-to-work program.