CRACK AND CANT

CHICAGO -- There is a controversy here because Barbara Harris in Anaheim,
Calif., got tired of her telephone ringing. She says, "I just couldn't
believe that my phone would ring every year and they would tell me she had
had another baby."

In a span of three years Harris, 47, and her husband adopted the four
youngest of eight babies born to one drug-addicted woman. Harris's efforts
to prevent the births of drug-addicted babies have provoked charges that
she is a genocidal racist. She is an unlikely target: She is white; her
husband and the adopted babies are African American.

From Harris's exasperation was born CRACK--Children Requiring A Caring
Kommunity, which pays $200 cash to addicts who acquire long-term
contraception or get sterilized. The Chicago CRACK program, founded here by
social worker Lyle Keller, has provoked furies from the indignation
industry in Chicago's black community. Some critics say the acronym
reinforces negative stereotypes. Others object to the location of the two
billboards that notify the public of CRACK's offer.

One billboard is in a Hispanic neighborhood within a few blocks of two drug
treatment centers and a 300-bed halfway house for drug addicts. A second,
larger billboard is in a black neighborhood. Some people interpret these
locations as racial or ethnic insults.

Is CRACK "targeting people of color"? No, the targets are addicts. Putting
billboards in posh suburbs or near lakefront "gold coast" apartments would
be a peculiar advertising tactic. There may be addicts in those places, but
not addicts to whom $200 means much.

Eight Chicago women--four black, four white--have completed Keller's
program. Five have had tubal ligations, two are using Depo-Provera, one is
using Norplant. Those eight women have had a total of 58 pregnancies, 15
abortions and 39 living children, 15 of them born exposed to drugs. Of the
39, 19 are with their mothers, 20 have been adopted or are in foster care.
Nationally, 87 women have fulfilled the CRACK requirements. The 87 have had
628 pregnancies, 234 of which were aborted, 394 brought to term.

Critics charge that the $200 incentive is "coercive," endangering
reproductive rights, particularly because addicts may be too addled by
drugs to manage informed consent. Keller responds: "If the
naysayers"--particularly, he says, Planned Parenthood and the American
Civil Liberties Union--"are so concerned about the woman's inability to
utilize informed consent in choosing long-term birth control, doesn't that
call into question that same woman's ability to effectively meet the needs
of her newborn baby?" Furthermore, Planned Parenthood does not test a woman
for drug addiction before helping her make a presumably informed decision
for abortion.

The controversy about CRACK is a case study in reckless commentary. Typical
of assaults on CRACK is a column in the Chicago Defender, an African
American newspaper, saying: "The suspicion is that the CRACK campaign is
yet another ploy aimed at reducing the African American population." And
Bruce Boyer of Northwestern University Law School, writing in the Chicago
Tribune, has raised the specter of eugenics.

He says, irrelevantly, that early in this century some reformers proposed
sterilization of some retarded persons, and he notes, ominously, that
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a case of the forced
sterilization of a retarded woman, said "three generations of imbeciles is
enough." Boyer adds, "Echoes of Holmes' words reverberate in the arguments
of CRACK founder Barbara Harris, who contends that the best solution to
curtailing the number of drug-addicted babies is to stop drug-addicted
parents from having children in the first place."

It takes willful perversity to hear such "echoes." Protecting the life
chances of babies has nothing to do with eugenics, CRACK forces no one to
do anything, and Harris and Keller stress that their program is no
substitute for large drug treatment efforts. Now operating in Minnesota,
Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Northern California, it is still a thimble for
bailing the ocean of half a million babies born each year after prenatal
exposure to drugs.

People concerned about the right of addicted women to inflict their
addictions on their babies ignore the baby's right not to have its life
blighted by a chemical assault in the womb. Fortunately, Clarence Page, the
Tribune's nationally syndicated African American columnist, has helped to
save this issue from being drowned in diatribe.

He says, "Harris appears to be just one of many angry Americans who has
held trembling drug-addicted babies in her arms and become outraged enough
to want to do something about it." Remarkable, is it not, how a single
adjective--"trembling"--can refute cant.