CRAZY IDEA SAVES BABIES OF ADDICTS

Last year was a good year for 37 drug addicts who didn't give birth to a
drug-addicted baby. Or seek an abortion. Or bury a premature child.

All thanks to one crazy woman in California, Barbara Harris, who believes
that any problem can be solved with common sense and a little cold cash --
even the problem of drug addicts bringing drug-addicted babies into a world
they themselves can't navigate.

It's been a little more than a year since I first wrote about Harris and
her groundbreaking, nonprofit program called CRACK, or Children Requiring a
Caring The program pays drug addicts to procure long-term birth control.
Since I wrote about her, Harris has appeared on several TV and radio talk
shows, attracting individual donations and corporate sponsors, and is
beginning to rewrite one of America's saddest tales.

Harris' plan was dazzling in its simplicity: Drug addicts care about drugs,
not babies, and they respond to money, not motivational moral-speak. Why
not pay them to stop having drug-addicted babies they can neither support
nor nurture?

It sounds cruel and coldhearted, but it sounds a lot nicer than the screams
of a cocaine-addicted baby thrashing against restraints in an intensive
care nursery crib.

Harris is familiar with those sounds. She adopted four of eight babies born
to one crack-addicted mother. All are thriving, now thanks to their
stable, nurturing environment, but they're among the lucky few.

Having nursed her four kids through scream-filled nights and the jitters of
drug withdrawal, Harris was tormented by the fates of all the other
drug-addicted babies. In 1997 she founded CRACK.

To date, she and her associate, Lin Alvarez, have paid 37 volunteer
clients. The women approach Harris through a hotline and promise to get
either a tubal ligation or Norplant, an epidermal patch that prevents
pregnancy for up to five years.

When the client verifies treatment with written notice from a clinic,
Harris hands over $200. A few men have filled out paperwork, but so far
none has followed through, says Harris.

The 37 women Harris has helped thus far already were responsible for 297
pregnancies, of which 184 went to term. Abortions accounted for 113.
Fifteen babies were stillborn; 13 died after birth; 132 are in foster care.

Note that I haven't used the words "crack baby." Joining the trend against
labeling babies born to crack mothers, Harris prefers the term
"substance-exposed infants." Children identified at birth as "crack babies"
often are stigmatized as developmentally damaged and left at the bottom of
the adoption pool.

Recent research has shown -- and Harris' experience confirms -- that babies
exposed to crack can overcome their difficult beginnings if placed quickly
in a loving, stable environment.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of substance-exposed infants end up in
foster care, and therein lies the tragedy. According to Harris, 80 percent
of birth mothers of drug-addicted babies never reclaim their children.
Twenty percent of those who do reclaim their children come back into the
system through the birth of another substance-exposed infant or for child
abuse/neglect.

By any measure, it's better to prevent such tragedies than to bemoan our
failures later, says Harris. Anyone who thinks otherwise, she says, "better
be ready to adopt."