AMERICA HAS TOO MANY CRACK BABIES, And Now Drug-Addicted Mothers Are Being
Paid $200 to be sterilised. Some call it the final solution.

Annette Witheridge tells how a woman trying to stem a tide of 'lost
children' is being compared to Hitler

SHARON Adams has given birth to 14 children. All have different fathers,
one is in prison for drug dealing, another is dead, eight were born
addicted to crack cocaine. And all but two went straight into care.
Incredibly, in drug plagued America, Sharon's story is not that unusual.

But, unlike most of the crack horror stories, Sharon's tale has a happy
ending. While pregnant with her last son, the 37-year-old junkie prostitute
finally vowed to clean up her act.

She met Barbara Harris, the woman she now calls her guardian angel, and in
exchange for $200 (UKP125) she agreed to be sterilised. As an added
incentive, she will also get another $25 for every other woman she
persuades to get sterilised through Harris's group CRACK - Children
Requiring a Caring Kommunity.

Harris hit on doing something about California's lost children - often born
with horrific drug withdrawal symptoms and immediately placed in foster
care - when by default she ended up adopting the fifth, then the sixth,
seventh and eighth babies born to a woman who had no interest in rearing them.

Offering women a cash incentive, she managed to persuade the women to
either get sterilised or have contraceptive implants. And she offered the
same to drug-addicted men to get vasectomies. Word soon spread and before
long big-business donations of up to UKP20,000 a time were flooding in to
help cover her costs.

Almost immediately she persuaded 13 women, who between them had given birth
to 78 children, to get sterilised. But as word has spread, and another 15
women had the operation, she has suddenly found herself accused of playing
God.

Furious civil liberties campaigners are trying to stop her. As Dr Xylina
Bean, the head of neonatalogy at a South Central Los Angeles hospital where
many of the drug addicted women give birth, puts it: "What Harris is doing
reminds me of Hitler." Harris hotly denies the charges. "We don't allow
dogs to breed," she says. "We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep
them from having unwanted puppies. And yet these women are literally having
litters of children. They're not just having one or two."

Sharon, herself the 14th of 14 children, has now become a poster girl for
CRACK and happily supports Harris's work. As she sits in the tiny living
area of her downtown Los Angeles apartment, Sharon looks lovingly at her
one-year-old son Kendall and tells her sorry life story.

Speaking with a slight lisp through her missing front teeth, she tells how
her teenage marijuana use quickly spiralled into out-of-control crack
smoking. At times, and often to ease pains during her pregnancy, she took
40 hits a day.

Inevitably, she soon turned to prostitution to feed her habit, and was
selling her body for as little as UKP3.50 a time. Very often she didn't
even bother to use condoms and "worked" right the way through to the ninth
month of many of her pregnancies.

"They didn't care that I was pregnant," she explains, almost dismissively.
"They got what they wanted and I got what I wanted - the money to buy my
drugs."

Every time 37-year-old Sharon gave birth, each of her children was
inevitably taken into care. "I don't know what it was that was different
about my last pregnancy," she says, "but I just thought that I had to do
something for this unborn child."

'OVER 20 years I had had 13 kids and I'd lost them all. And I knew the 14th
would have to be my last and I simply didn't want to lose him."

Determined to clean up her act, she volunteered to go into drugs
rehabilitation and met Harris. "At first I was sceptical," she says. "But
the more babies you have, the worse it hurts. The actual giving birth gets
worse.

"The day after Kendall was born I was sterilised. The $200 arrived in the
post two weeks later. I've been clean and sober for a year now and I am
going to do my best to help other women."

Lazunda Douglas's life was following the same pattern as Sharon's when she
met Harris. An unwanted pregnancy at 14 was followed by the drug and
alcohol abuse that is rife in Los Angeles. Two years, and two more kids
later, her drug dealer boyfriend was sent to prison. Not surprisingly,
after calls from worried neighbours, all three children were taken into care.

The turning point for 27-year-old Douglas came after she gave birth to her
fourth child, Deoin, now eight months old. He was born horribly addicted
and immediately taken into care.

Lazunda met Harris and agreed to be sterilised. She knows her childhood
dream of having a loving husband and a couple of perfect children will
never happen, but the new drug-free Lazunda is fighting to get back the
four she has already lost.

"I don't see any reason to have any more kids. Four is enough and I am
struggling to get those back."

Harris set up CRACK just 12 months ago and Lazunda was one of the first to
respond after she spotted a poster stuck on the side of a bus stop in Los
Angeles. "If you use drugs, get birth control and get $200 cash," it read.

The scheme soon gained publicity and donations started flooding in. Even
doctors have started referring women to 45-year-old Harris, a quietly
spoken white woman married to her African-American childhood sweetheart
Smitty.

She laughs as she explains how CRACK came about. She and Smitty had six
sons and were desperate for a little girl so they decided to adopt. They
were given eight-month-old Destiny, who had been born to a crack-addicted
mother. Not long afterwards the adoption agency approached them asking if
they would like to take on another baby born to the same woman. Over the
next two years they had another two from the same mother.

It rankled that the children's mother "was allowed to just visit her local
hospital yearly and drop off her damaged babies and nobody would even give
her a slap on the hand," Harris says.

After nursing all four babies through horrific drug withdrawal symptoms she
started asking around to see what she could do to help. The nurses, police
and social workers just shrugged, so she set about lobbying Californian
state politician Phil Hawkins to introduce a bill making it a crime to give
birth to an addicted baby.

The bill failed, but suddenly Harris's telephone began to ring. She was
invited on the Oprah Winfrey Show and became a regular on radio programmes.
A couple of the disc jockeys suggested she set up CRACK, and one of them is
now a committee member.

Harris, a former waitress who looks more like a typical American soccer mom
than a saviour of drug addicts, is well aware of the criticism she has
received. The once-shy schoolgirl who was too frightened to speak out in
class now fights her corner with a loud and clear voice.

"These women are not having kids out of the love of children or because
they are responsible and want to raise them," she says. "They are having
kids because they're irresponsible and with their lifestyle it just happens.

"You have to look at both sides. Some people say these women are not
rational enough about their reproductive future. I say they are not
rational enough to make the decision to bring a human being into this world
either.

"It's a baby's right not to be force-fed drugs but nobody's doing anything
for them. That's my issue, it's not about the women. People are already
fighting that battle."

But Dr Bean, leading the civil rights outcry, disagrees. "I initially
thought Barbara Harris was a naive do-gooder who was trying to deal in a
very simplistic way with a very complex problem she didn't really understand.

"But, in fact, what she is doing reminds me of Hitler. She's decided a
sector of society is not entitled to a basic human right - reproduction.

Checked-by: Richard Lake