THE $200 FIX

Positive Prevention Puts A Price On Poor Peoples' Reproductive Freedom

Last week, Real Change reported on the start-up efforts of a local group
called Positive Prevention that offers drug addicts $200 to get long-term
birth control. Perhaps our reporting was a little too "objective." One
reader assumed we were joking. We also got a thank-you letter from a member
of the group, in appreciation of the "positive" press.

Her thank-you was well-earned. It's hard to report fairly on a group that
wants to fix mothers likely to bear unhealthy babies in the name of
protecting children. It's an inhumane tactic that purchases the
reproductive rights of women with the one thing no real addict can refuse:
cash.

A Positive Prevention volunteer asked me not to use the word
"sterilization" in reporting on the group's goals. She emphasized that the
group lets women choose temporary options like IUDs, Norplant, or hormonal
injections. But it will also pay women to get permanent tubal ligations.

If that's not sterilization, call it eugenics. That's the effect of the
cash-for-contraceptives tactic, employed in Chicago and the Bay Area by a
group called CRACK ("Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity"). It's an echo
of the forced sterilization movement that gained a foothold in this country
nearly 100 years ago.

Around the country, drug addicts are perhaps the most despised group of
social deviants around. Legislators looking for easy votes raise the
specter of welfare cheats driving nice cars, or spending their
taxpayer-provided income on drugs, or getting pregnant, then getting more
welfare money when a new baby comes along.

Some estimate that a half-million babies are born having been exposed to
drugs in the womb. While prenatal damage to babies is horrible, many babies
show no signs of long-term damage. But even if they were all healthy, their
mothers could be in jail: victims of harsh mandatory minimum sentences for
nonviolent drug offenses. Whether stunted by drugs or hunted by
politicians, these mothers are entrapped. As the New Republic wrote last
year, "the only figure this society views with more contempt than a crack
whore is a pregnant crack whore."

The cash-for-contraceptives approach makes a kind of sardonic sense. It may
be the only immediate attention poor female addicts can find. About 500
people are on the Seattle-King County Public Health Department's waiting
list for subsidized methadone treatment, prolonging the dire wait for an
alternative to heroin. For these women, the prospect of getting $200 for
birth control from some do-gooder must sound like a real business opportunity.

The costs, of course, are the rights of the mothers. And here's a point
around which even conservatives can rally: Positive Prevention puts a price
on reproductive freedom. The American Civil Liberties Union has documented
the government's decade-long attempts to get birth control implants
mandated by law on female drug addicts. In some states, legislatures have
tried to enshrine Positive Prevention's tactics in law by giving drug
offenders a choice between Norplant and prison, or offering
cash-for-contraceptives to women on welfare.

Reproductive freedom is a constitutional right, and "incentive plans, while
not couched as requirements, are nonetheless coercive," the ACLU writes.
"The offer of money to feed, clothe, and house their families - even if it
is in exchange for giving up their constitutional rights - may be difficult
to refuse." Some peoples' rights come cheaper than others. The more
disposable your future, the more disposable your genes.

Even the inventor of Norplant, Dr. Sheldon Segal, was horrified at the
coercive possibilities of his creation. "My colleagues and I worked on this
innovation for decades because we respect human dignity and believe that
women should be able to have the number of children they want, when they
want to have them," he told the ACLU. "Not just educated and well-to-do
women, but all women."

As long as the cash-for-contraceptives movement relies on myths, here's a
counter-image for its supporters to chew on: a Positive Prevention or CRACK
graduate, broke again, having unprotected sex in exchange for her next fix,
or simply in return for a night out of the cold. Desperately poor women
sometimes grasp motherhood as the last vocation available to them, besides
prostitution. Perhaps to choose sterility is to achieve a rueful freedom
from their bodies. And for some, abandoned by everything else, the price is
right.