NO-CHILD DEAL SET AT $500

Prostitute Must Agree To Birth Control To Get Cash

A Rochester woman who has been ordered to bear no more children until she
can care for the seven she has now would receive $500 if she consents to
long-term or permanent birth control.

A Rochester woman who has been ordered to bear no more children until she
can care for the seven she has now would receive $500 if she consents to
long-term or permanent birth control.The offer came Wednesday from Project
Prevention, a North Carolina-based nonprofit organization that pays cash to
drug addicts and alcoholics if they limit their ability to procreate."Money
motivates everybody, not just drug addicts," group founder Barbara Harris
said from her home near Charlotte, N.C.

But Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties
Union, said the payoff would backfire if the mother uses the money to buy
more drugs."Giving $500 to someone with a serious drug problem ... is not
going to do anything to help the drug problem," Lieberman said. "It may, in
fact, help facilitate the drug problem."Monroe County Family Court Judge
Marilyn L. O'Connor has ordered the woman, a 31-year-old homeless and
cocaine-addicted prostitute identified in court papers only as "Judgette
W.," to have no more children until she can care for her children, who
range in age from 8 months to 12 years.Six of the children are in foster
care and one is living with an aunt. At least three tested positive for
cocaine at birth.

County Conflict Defender Richard Youngman, whose office represented
Judgette, declined to comment about the case except to say that he would
appeal O'Connor's order.Harris said she intends to travel to Rochester to
try to find the woman and offer her the money in person.

She'll come in a 30-foot-long motor home that is covered with advertising
for Project Prevention.Harris founded the group in Los Angeles in 1998
after she adopted four of the eight children born to a crack cocaine addict.

She failed in an effort to enact legislation in California that would
punish women who exposed their children to drugs during pregnancy."Each
year, they (child caseworkers) would call and say, 'She had another one. Do
you want it?'" Harris said. "It just broke my heart.

I just couldn't understand how we as a society that supposedly cares about
children could allow this to happen."Since then, the group has given cash
incentives to 1,417 clients: 1,390 women and 27 men in 39 states and the
District of Columbia.

Project Prevention has had five clients in New York four in the Bronx and
one in Niagara Falls. Between them, the five women had been pregnant 27
times, given birth 19 times and had eight abortions.

Of their children, 13 are still in foster care, two died in infancy and one
was stillborn."You have to be an idiot to truly believe that these women's
right to get pregnant as often as they want is more important than their
children's quality of life," Harris said."There's no way that's acceptable
thinking," she said. "I've seen too many of these children suffer.

If people really believe these women have a right to have these children,
then they need to step up and adopt the next one that's born."But Lieberman
said O'Connor's ban on procreation and Project Prevention's offered payoff
are simplistic solutions to complex problems.

"The problem of adults who are dysfunctional and unable to care for their
children as a result of drug abuse and drug or alcohol dependence is a
really difficult issue," she said. "There is not an easy solution, but
neither sterilization by bribe or prohibition of procreation is a
solution."Harris, however, said the emphasis should be put on children born
to drug-addicted parents.

"I'm so sick of these women's rights organizations talking about the rights
of the woman," she said. "What about the rights of the children? Don't they
have rights a right to have a parent who loves them, a right to be born to
a drug-free parent?"Planned Parenthood of the Rochester/Syracuse Region has
no position on Project Prevention. If Judgette W. goes to Planned
Parenthood for services, she will be treated the same as any other woman,
said spokeswoman Sherry Handel."She would be given a full range of birth
control and family planning options," Handel said. "As long as it's not a
coerced situation where she's mandated to come here, and she's coming on
her own free will, we're fine with that."