Paying to Keep Addicts From Giving Birth

Should drug addicts stop giving birth to children?

Barbara Harris think so. For 16 years, she's been encouraging U.S. drug addicts to become sterilized or use long-term forms of birth control. In fact, over the years, her organization (Project Prevention) has paid for some form of birth control for nearly 3,400 clients, including women in all 50 states. The organization says its goal is to "reduce the number of substance-exposed births to zero."

And if that weren't enough, now, Project Prevention is expanding to the U.K.

There's something very wrong with this picture. While family planning should be included in drug treatment programs, Project Prevention crosses that line by a mile. Offering cash to a vulnerable population to entice women to give up their permanent reproductive rights strikes me as a form of social engineering and a declaration that addicts are beyond helping.

The money raised and spent by Project Prevention would be much better spent on drug treatment. Helping women rebuild their lives to the point where they may want to start a family would be much more productive than treating them like a virus that needs to be contained.

While some children born to mothers with drug addictions do have health problems, most are perfectly healthy. (The supposed "crack baby" epidemic was a myth.) One of the dangers of Project Prevention is that it portrays drug addicts as helpless and doomed and their children as damaged. Most of the time, this isn't the case.

The issues with Project Prevention (formerly known as C.R.A.C.K.) are simply too many to enumerate here. But luckily for us, National Advocates for Pregnant Women director Lynn Paltrow took on the challenge in an excellent 2006 paper, in which she systematically deconstructs the flaws in the organization's mission.

Paltrow writes: "Under the guise of openness, 'voluntary' choice, and personal empowerment, C.R.A.C.K. not only promotes a vicious image of the 'eternal drug addict,' it has won significant support for a program and an ideology that is at the core of civil rights violations and eugenic population control efforts."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Photo Credit: I woz ere