STOPPING BIRTHS OF DRUG-ADDICTED BABIES IS NOT RACIST

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. Her 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' exasperation was born CRACK -Children Requiring A Caring
Kommunity, which pays $200 cash to drug addicts who acquire long-term
contraception or get sterilized.

The Chicago CRACK program, founded by social worker Lyle Keller, has
provoked predictable furies from the indignation industry in Chicago's
black community. Some critics say the acronym CRACK reinforces
negative stereotypes. Another objection is 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 and
one is using Norplant. Those 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 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 American
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 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 emphatically say their small
program is no substitute for large drug treatment efforts. It is now
operating in Minnesota, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and northern
California, but 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 Chicago 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.
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George F. Will is a writer with the Washington Post Writers
Group.