CONCERN FOR KIDS PROMPTS OFFER TO WOMEN ON DRUGS

MOM smoked crack. The baby was born three months early, way too small, with
undeveloped lungs and cerebral palsy. As she fought for her life in the
intensive care nursery, her mother walked out.

Last week in Oakland, community activists tore down a billboard ad offering
addicted women $200 to use long-term birth control. The privately funded
program known as CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity) is a ploy to
``neuter poor women,'' they said. It's racist. It's coercive. What if a
poor, addicted woman takes $200 to be sterilized, and then wants children later?

``What about the children?'' asks Harvey Chao. Like CRACK's founder, an
Orange County woman named Barbara Harris, Chao and his wife have cared for
and adopted addicts' children.

``These people talking so loudly about a woman's rights should try caring
for one of these children for a few years,'' Chao says.

Try to comfort a crying baby who can't bear to be touched. Try to connect
with a neglected child who never learned to form attachments. Try to toilet
train a six-year-old. Try to teach a child with a gastronomy tube to chew
and swallow.

Brenda Chao was a nurse before the birth of their two sons. As foster
parents, they took in medically fragile children, children whose mothers had
taken crack, PCP, heroin, alcohol and other drugs.

One PCP-exposed child, 3 1/2 years old, was headed for an institution when
the Chaos agreed to take her in their Santa Clara home. It was her 14th
placement. ``She had a horrendous scream,'' Chao recalls. ``Nobody could
bear it.''

They're now the adoptive parents or permanent guardians of seven children.
``Somebody had to do it,'' Chao says.

But, usually, nobody does. There aren't enough foster homes for healthy
children, much less people who want to raise children disabled by maternal
drug abuse or neglect.

Harris and her husband, a surgical technician, started by fostering an
eight-month-old girl, a crack addict's fifth child. Four months later, they
were asked to take her newborn brother. A year later, the mother had a baby
girl. A year after that came another boy. All the children were ``crack
babies.''

The Harrises adopted the four children. All are now healthy and thriving.

But Harris was angered by their mother's irresponsibility. She pushed for a
state law penalizing women who expose unborn babies to dangerous drugs. When
that failed, she decided to dangle a carrot. Many addicted women don't want
to go through another pregnancy, she thought, but they need some motivation
to seek out birth control. With donated money, she put up a billboard with
the $200 offer.

The first check went to a 28-year-old recovering crack addict with one
drug-free baby -- and five drug-exposed children in foster care.

To protesters, CRACK's message is not what it says on the billboard: ``If
you're addicted, get birth control -- get $200.''

It's society's way of saying: We don't want poor people to be born. We don't
want non-white people to be born.

Whatever the motivation of donors, Harris seems indifferent to race. She's
white. But her husband, the surgical technician is black, as are the four
children they adopted.

Of course, CRACK is aimed at women poor enough to be motivated by $200. But
the money is offered on the basis of addiction -- a doctor's note is
required -- not race or ethnicity. CRACK's 85 clients include 36 whites, 34
blacks and 15 Hispanics.

CRACK's critics also say the program takes advantage of a woman's addiction.
She'll do anything for $200, even give up her ability to have children in
the future. A woman on drugs can't make a free choice, they argue.

But if she's incompetent to choose birth control, is she competent to raise
a child?

In addition to sterilization, CRACK (see www.cashforbirthcontrol.com on the
Web) also pays for reversible methods of birth control, including a series
of Depo-Provera injections, which work for three months per shot, or
Norplant, which provides five years of birth control, or an IUD.

The majority choose tubal ligation, Harris says, because they've already had
children -- an average of four per woman -- and know they don't want more.

Before coming to CRACK, the 85 women had 617 pregnancies in all. After
subtracting for abortions (231), stillbirths (38) and deaths from birth
defects (26), they have 322 living children. Of these, 239 were in foster care.

Even if they're born healthy, children raised by addicted mothers face bleak
futures. So do children who grow up in the foster care system, never finding
a permanent home. What about the children?

If you think bribing addicts is unsettling, consider the scheme cooked up in
Lake Oswego, Ore., when Timothy Park, 23, came home from prison. He'd served
four years for raping a four-year-old girl and molesting two other children.
(Four years for raping a child!)

The neighbors offered him a college scholarship -- but only if he goes away
to college and never comes back.

Joanne Jacobs is a member of the Mercury News editorial board. Her column
appears on Mondays and Thursdays. Write to her at 750 Ridder Park Dr., San
Jose, CA 95190, or e-mail JJacobs@sjmercury.com.