PEOPLE RECEIVE DIFFERENT IDEAS FROM BILLBOARD

There's a new billboard scheduled to go up Saturday on LBJ Freeway at
Northwest Highway. It's hard to miss.

"Offering $200 CASH to drug addicts who participate in long term birth
control," it says.

The offer is real. So far, Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity, or CRACK
(I would have picked another name), has handed $200 checks to 161 substance
abusers. Each has to show proof of getting Norplant, a tubal ligation or
other semi-permanent means of pregnancy prevention.

CRACK will pay men or women, but so far, only one man has claimed $200 for
his vasectomy. The rest have been women who, for reasons they didn't have to
share, wanted the cash.

Pretty straightforward.

Angry critics

But the offer, already publicized in a dozen other cities, upsets some
people. A few critics view the billboards as antifeminist, an effort to
intervene in reproductive decisions. Others think they're racist because the
boards have been predominantly sited in poor, minority neighborhoods.

A handful of protesters grew so irate they climbed a ladder and tried to
tear down a CRACK billboard in Oakland, Calif., last fall.

I called CRACK founder Barbara Harris at her home in Southern California
this week. She didn't sound like a dangerous nut.

"Hold on a sec," she said, trying to shush a bunch of chattering kids in the
background. She sounded like a very ordinary, very busy suburban mom.

What she doesn't volunteer, unless you ask, is that her kids are the reason
she launched this program in the first place. Barbara Harris is white; her
husband is black. The four youngest of their seven kids are also black, all
abandoned by a birth mother who was hooked on crack cocaine and couldn't, or
didn't, want to cope with children.

Ms. Harris loves her children dearly, but she doesn't want more babies being
born to people who are demonstrably unable to take care of them. End of
story.

"It's common sense," she said. "We're trying to prevent pregnancy in women
addicted to drugs or alcohol."

And the hard truth is that cash sometimes succeeds where education and
coercion and appeals to conscience fail.

Troubled lives

I agree that the message is pretty startling. At first glance, there's
something unseemly about it, as if somebody wanted to discard women
suffering from addictions by sterilizing them and throwing them back out on
the street, instead of trying to help.

But let's review some facts. There are already agencies where people with
substance-abuse trouble can turn for help.

For Ms. Harris, galvanized by her own experience, this issue is entirely
personal. For the women who apply for the $200, it's entirely voluntary.

It only becomes political when it's politicized by somebody outside that
equation.

In news accounts about the program, one angry critic who runs a
drug-recovery program blasted CRACK for coercing women to make "life
choices" about long-term birth control while they're too clouded by drugs to
think clearly.

Beg pardon? Isn't having a baby a "life choice" you might also want to make
only while thinking lucidly?

Listen, I think everybody should think long and hard before deciding to have
kids. Children can't fend for themselves. They all need responsible,
attentive parents.

The four who are flourishing in the Harris home are lucky. A lot of helpless
babies aren't lucky.

If you consider Barbara Harris' approach insensitive, so be it.

She's not offering apologies. She's not offering an end-all solution to the
plagues of poverty and addiction. She's not offering a political viewpoint.

She's offering $200. It might be the best offer some people have seen in a
while.