NO MORE BABIES

C.R.A.C.K.'S Barbara Harris Discusses Her Crusade To Offer Sterilization To
Drug-Addicted Women For A Price

VICKI MABREY, co-host: Every year in America, thousands of babies are born
with drugs in their systems, the product of mothers who are sometimes
strung out right up until labor sets in. How do you prevent that? The
woman you're about to meet thinks she has the answer: sterilization. And
it's not just a theory. She's putting it into practice, traveling around
the country on a crusade, getting drug addicts to give up the ability to
have children--no more babies--in return for cash. Her critics say it's
akin to Nazi eugenics, targeting so-called undesirables and making sure
they can't reproduce.

Ms. BARBARA HARRIS (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity): Our
organization offers cash incentives to women who abuse drugs, and men as well.

(Footage of Harris soliciting on the streets)

MABREY: (Voiceover) The deal sounds simple. Get birth control; get cash.
That's the offer being made in poor neighborhoods across the country, most
recently in Detroit.

Ms. HARRIS: We're trying to prevent drug-addicted babies from being born.

MABREY: (Voiceover) The woman peddling this offer is Barbara Harris,
founder of an organization called Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity, or
CRACK.

Unidentified Woman #1: I use heroin and crack.

Ms. HARRIS: I was actually talking to a girl who was six months pregnant
and had had several babies, and she was still using drugs. And I was asking
her, you know, 'What can we do to get these women to be responsible and use
birth control?' And she's like, 'Give them 20 bucks.'

MABREY: Twenty bucks? To give up their reproductive rights?

Ms. HARRIS: Said, 'Give them 20 bucks.'

(Footage of CRACK billboards, posters and places they're shown)

MABREY: (Voiceover) Harris upped the ante to 200 bucks and started
advertising on billboards, in liquor stores and rehab centers, and by word
of mouth in poor neighborhoods.

Ms. HARRIS: It seems everybody knows somebody, so if we could leave some
fliers with you...

MABREY: So what's your goal for Detroit?

Ms. HARRIS: The goal is to be a household name. We want everybody to know,
as soon as they hear the word alcoholism or drug addict, about our program.

(To store clerk) We're an organization that offers...

MABREY: (Voiceover) She is a suburban soccer mom turned birth control
crusader, a crusader motivated by personal experience.

(Footage of Harris' family; photograph)

MABREY: (Voiceover) After raising three sons of their own, Harris and her
husband adopted an eight-month-old baby girl who was born as the fifth
child of a drug-addicted woman, a woman had already lost her first four
children to the state.

Ms. HARRIS: I drove to LA to pick up Destiny, and we brought her home. And
four months later we got a phone call from the social worker saying, 'Guess
what? The mom had her sixth baby--another baby--it's a baby boy--do you
want him?' So we decided to bring Isaiah home so that at least two of them
could be together. The following year it was the same story: the mother
had had her seventh baby, a baby girl, and did we want her? So we decided
to bring home Taylor, because at this point, it was my family, as far as I
was concerned. And then the following year, there was another baby born,
her eighth, a baby boy. And at this point, my husband said, 'Barbara, I'm
not buying a school bus. We can't keep taking this lady's kids.' And we
talked him into taking just one more, and--and, fortunately, it was the
last one because if she'd had gone on and had more, they'd be living here.

(Footage of Harris family activities)

MABREY: (Voiceover) Although Harris' children are healthy today, all four
were born exposed to crack, and went through withdrawal. Though they've
tried to contact the children's biological mother, the Harrises, have never
heard from her.

Ms. HARRIS: I couldn't believe that we, as a society, allow these women to
do this to children. These women are showing up in the hospital on drugs,
which is illegal, and yet they're allowed to just drop off a damaged baby
and walk away, and there's no consequences.

MABREY: So Harris pushed for legislation that would force the women to use
birth control or risk going to jail. But when that failed, she turned to
the power of money. The CRACK program pays people $ 200 to be surgically
sterilized or to get long-term birth control like an IUD or
Norplant. About 50 percent of CRACK's clients have chosen sterilization.
Because most of the women are poor, the surgery or birth control is paid
for by Medicaid.

(Footage of Nicole Smith at home; in the hospital)

MABREY: (Voiceover) One woman who's taken up CRACK's offer is Nicole Smith,
a recovering methamphetamine user who at age 25 has four children, and has
lost custody of all of them to her mother. After seeing an ad for Harris'
program, she decided to get sterilized.

How did you decide to get the tubal ligation?

Ms. NICOLE SMITH (Drug User): By knowing that the money was there.

MABREY: The money?

Ms. SMITH: Yeah.

MABREY: So it was really the money that induced you.

Ms. SMITH: It was the--that was the sole purpose of me getting my tubes
tied, because of the money.

MABREY: Why?

Ms. SMITH: Knowing that was the easy way for me to get my next high if I
needed that. The money was there.

MABREY: Does it bother you that these women might take the $ 200, go around
the corner and buy drugs?

Ms. HARRIS: No. Because they're going to do that anyway. And they may go
use that money for drugs, but that's their choice. The babies don't have a
choice.

A doctor in Dover, Delaware...

(Footage of Harris in her home; Laura Schlessinger; Richard Skafe)

MABREY: (Voiceover) Harris' point of view has attracted a lot of support.
Donations are pouring in from across the country.

Ms. HARRIS: San Francisco, $ 200.

MABREY: (Voiceover) And not just small ones. She's been criticized for
taking donations--large ones--from people like controversial talk show host
Dr. Laura Schlessinger...

Dr. LAURA SCHLESSINGER (Talk Show Host): Her name is Barbara Harris, and
she is someone you should know.

MABREY: (Voiceover) ...and billionaire publisher Richard Skafe. The nearly
$ 1/2 million raised has enabled the CRACK organization to expand nationwide.

(Footage of demonstration; raising of billboard; tearing down of billboard;
demonstration)

Unidentified Woman #2: This is the criminalization of poor people...

MABREY: (Voiceover) But not every community has put out the welcome mat. In
Oakland, California, no sooner had a billboard gone up then angry
protesters tore it down. Ethel Long-Scott, a community activist and
advocate for the poor, led the protest.

CRACK has been welcomed with open arms in close to 20 communities but not
in Oakland.

Ms. ETHEL LONG-SCOTT (Community Activist): They parachuted into our
community. They came in high handed with--supposedly with all the answers.
And when we got the press release that 'if you're crack addicted, get $
200, get sterilized,' it was a sound of alarm as if someone had said the
Klan was marching through our town and we responded accordingly.

(Footage of protest)

MABREY: (Voiceover) The demonstrators geared Harris, called her a racist
and ran her out of town.

Ms. LONG-SCOTT: To steal the humanity of someone who is very vulnerable for
$ 200, this is incredible.

MABREY: They're not coerced. She's not...

Ms. LONG-SCOTT: Oh, I think seduc...

MABREY: She's not t--she's not twisting arms.

Ms. LONG-SCOTT: It's seduction. Two hundred dollars looks like a lot of
money when you don't have it. And Ms. Harris and her--and her supporters
know this.

(Footage of Long-Scott and Mabrey)

MABREY: (Voiceover) Long-Scott says Harris' offer is dangerous because some
addicts will do almost anything for money.

Ms. LONG-SCOTT: It seems so innocent unless you're the one who's eating out
of garbage cans or is--is turning tricks to pay for your addiction.

MABREY: If you're eating out of garbage cans and you're turning tricks to
pay for your addiction, should you bring a child into the world?

Ms. LONG-SCOTT: We don't want anybody having children that they cannot help
to bring up in a healthy manner. Yet, it happens all the time. And if we
really cared about it, stop the conditions that makes somebody to take the
dope in the first place. Cure the illness in our country, not throw away
the people.

MABREY: But is it fair to children for them to be born addicted?

Ms. LONG-SCOTT: Of course not. It's not fair to children to be born in
poverty. Poverty kills people. Our country has turned a blind eye to
that. These problems are not so separate. They're very interconnected.

MABREY: People think that you are targeting not only poor women but poor
minority women.

Ms. HARRIS: Right.

MABREY: Are you?

Ms. HARRIS: A lot of people, unfortunately, they assume when they hear
about what we do that we're targeting black women or that black women are
the only ones who are going to be taking us up on this offer, and to me
that is so racist to--to think that, number one, because it's not--this is
not a black problem. White women are using drugs as well. Everybody's using
drugs.

(Footage of document; people walking)

MABREY: (Voiceover) And she keeps the statistics to prove her point. Of the
nearly 400 people who've been paid by CRACK, roughly half are white, half
are black. And although she does pay $ 50 to individuals or organizations
that refer women to her, Harris says her offer ultimately relies on the
woman's right to choose.

Ms. HARRIS: We make an offer. They either choose to take us up on the
offer or they don't. Nobody's forced to do anything against their will. We
don't drag people off the street and sterilize them.

Ms. LONG-SCOTT: That is infuriating. We've heard this eugenics message
many times. In fact, in--my own state led the eugenics effort. So it's
not about what she individually intends to do any more than what the Nazis
did, but it is just as devastating.

(Vintage footage of Nazis; photos of various people, American Eugenics
Society; footage of newspaper clippings; Lynn Paltrow and Mabrey)

MABREY: (Voiceover) What the Nazis did was forcibly sterilize alcoholics
and others deemed undesirable, and they weren't the first. They modeled
their program on the United States where in the early 20th century, 30
states allowed the forced sterilization of over 60,000 people--people said
to be mentally defective or socially inadequate.

Attorney Lynn Paltrow, a reproductive rights advocate, believes CRACK comes
dangerously close to those eugenic practices of the past.

Ms. LYNN PALTROW (Attorney): There was a period of time where thousands of
people were sterilized on the claim that they were retarded. And the truth
was that many of them not only had no mental disability--and even that
would not have been a justification--but also many of them, in fact, were
just poor. And when you look at a history...

MABREY: But that was a government program; this is private.

Ms. PALTROW: At the...

MABREY: This is one woman's crusade.

Ms. PALTROW: Absolutely. And that does not mean she's immune from
criticism. It may mean that there's no perfect lawsuit at the moment, but
it does not mean that she should not be criticized for spreading myths and
lies about drug-using women who can be helped through drug treatment, who
desperately want drug treatment and can't get it but suddenly they can get
$ 200 to be sterilized.

MABREY: You've been criticized by people who say, 'Shouldn't the $ 200 be
used for treatment, for housing, for job training for these women, not to
take away their reproductive rights?'

Ms. HARRIS: Right. And drug treatment is not the solution. It's only the
solution if these women stay in drug treatment, get clean and never use
drugs again. But that's not the reality of it. That's what everybody
would like but that's not the reality.

MABREY: You were quoted one time as saying that these women have litters of
children. That kind of language upsets a lot of people.

Ms. HARRIS: Well, you know, be--and my son that goes to Sanford said, 'Mom,
please don't ever say that again,' but it's the truth. They don't just
have one and two babies; they have litters.

Ms. PALTROW: The vast majority of drug use in pregnant women have the same
number of children as everybody else. So perpetuating the myth that they
are all out there procreating--as she says, like dogs having litters--is
extremely damaging and disturbing in terms of how people think about women
with drug problems.

Ms. STEPHANIE SANDERS: So many people are so concerned about the
reproductive rights of these women and they're forgetting about the victims.

(Footage of children)

MABREY: (Voiceover) Stephanie Sanders, head of CRACK's Fresno, California,
chapter, is a single working mother who's adopted or fostered several
drug-exposed children, including Christina, CRACK's poster child. At birth,
Christina was premature and left in an alley. Today, at age three, she
suffers from cerebral palsy and fetal alcohol syndrome. Stephanie Sanders
is angry with critics who call the CRACK program racist and unethical but
who don't take in children like Christina.

Ms. SANDERS: My phone rings off the hook with them calling me to take a
child. I have to tell them, 'I can't take that child because I don't have
anymore room.'

MABREY: Do you think that some people are hypocrites who say, 'Don't take
away the rights of these mothers,' but also don't want to take in these
children?

Ms. SANDERS: Definitely. And that's what I say to anybody that tells me '
What you're doing is wrong. You're coercing the women. It's not OK to do
that. It's not ethical.' I say, 'Until you're a--willing to take one of
these children and--and adopt them, your opinion means absolutely nothing
to me.' It doesn't.

Ms. HARRIS: You don't want to go to gymnastics?

(Footage of Harris with children)

Ms. HARRIS: If every child that was born had a home like my children have,
maybe this wouldn't be such a tragedy. But that's not the case. Too many
of these kids are in foster ho--foster care, l--going from home to
home. Nobody really believes in them, nobody cares about them. And at age
18, 50 percent of these kids become homeless. So it's--the--the reality is
that they're better off not being born.

(Footage of letter being opened)

MABREY: (Voiceover) As for the women who've taken up CRACK's offer? Harris
says in the three years she's been running the program, she's received no
complaints, only thank you letters from clients like Nicole Smith.

You're struggling now, but what about when you get your life together, you
meet someone that you want to marry. Will you want to have children?

Ms. SMITH: No, I don't ever want to have any more.

MABREY: Do you feel that you gave up a right, though, that you had?

Ms. SMITH: No. I think my right was given up when I started using drugs
when I was pregnant.

MABREY: Are you glad that you went through with the operation?

Ms. SMITH: Oh, definitely.

MABREY: And not just for the money?

Ms. SMITH: I'm glad that I know that I'll never be able to bring another
baby in this world, especially having a parent like me, after all the bad
stuff that I've done.

(Footage of 60 MINUTES II clock)

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