CHILDREN OR CRACK: WHICH WOULD YOU CHOOSE?

In the US last year, 800,000 babies were born addicted to drugs or alcohol.
Now Barbara Harris has come up with a solution, one she is bringing here:
pay junkies to be sterilised. Diane Taylor reports

A woman steps off the plane at Manchester airport. She represents a
little-known American organisation called Crack and she is weighed down
with leaflets and brochures bearing slogans such as 'Get Birth Control, Get
Cash' and 'Don't Let A Pregnancy Ruin Your Drug Habit'.

Crack stands for Children Requiring A Caring Kommunity. It is based in Los
Angeles and run by a woman called Barbara Harris. Her mission? To tackle
the spiralling problem of US babies born addicted to drugs or alcohol -
800,000 a year at the last count. Her solution? Sterilisation.

There may not be the huge problem of crack babies here that there is in the
US, but the numbers of those born gasping for their in utero fix of heroin,
alcohol or other drugs is on the increase. And if Harris, 47, gets her way,
the controversial sterilisation scheme she set up a year ago could be
exported to the UK. Lyn Alvarez, Harris's right-hand woman arrived in
Britain yesterday to promote Crack. She is recording a slot for a pilot TV
chat show but is happy to explain how the organisation works to anyone keen
to set up a branch here. Harris suggests Alvarez's hotel phone number be
included in this article so that anyone interested in taking up the cudgels
can get in touch.

Evangelical in her bid to prevent women (and men) who abuse drugs from
reproducing, she is urging us to tackle the problem of 'junkie babies' her
way before we are landed with an epidemic on the American scale. Her
solution to the baby addicts, sometimes dubbed throwaway children, goes
something like this. Dangle a cash carrot in front of impoverished male and
female drug and alcohol users, and thus get them to agree to a
sterilisation or vasectomy. Norplant, a long-term contraceptive implant, is
also considered an acceptable option for women. The reward is $200 and, in
the best tradition of pyramid sales, there is another $50 on offer if you
can persuade someone else to sign up.

In America, the organisation is still small, only just beginning to spread
beyond the state of California. So far, a total of 35 women have been
tempted by the cash-for-sterilisation deal; no male drug users have so far
signed up for the snip, but there have been inquiries. The ripples,
however, have spread far. Harris's sternest critics, both the pro-choice
and pro-life posses, accuse her of Hitleresque eugenics, of denying women
the basic right of reproduction and of failing to consider the prospect of
redemption among chaotic drug users who may later get clean but by then
will have blown their chances of a baby in true Faustian fashion.

Roberta Synal of Planned Parenthood, America's biggest birth control
organisation, believes that Harris's obvious energy would be better
channelled into early education of youngsters to prevent them getting
caught up in drugs and unwanted pregnancies in the first place. "It's not
acceptable just to write women off for the sake of saving their babies from
being born. There are two people in the picture here."

There are concerns here, too, about the absolutism of Harris's vision. Pat
Thompson, of the health information centre Women's Health, says the scheme
smacks of social engineering. "This seems like an abuse of power to me. She
is overstepping the boundaries and playing God." But for Harris, everything
is certainties and she blithely dismisses the row as media hype.
"Journalists always want to put two sides of a story, so they go find
someone who disagrees with me," she says. "But in fact I've hardly received
anything negative. After we went on one of the TV networks, I received 150
e-mails, 149 of them supportive." On that thorny issue of women's
reproductive rights, certainties come to the fore again. "In most cases,
the women have had several children already. If they get off drugs, they
can go back and claim their kids. For those who do not have other children,
there may be regret but allowing them to go on and abuse their children is
a far bigger regret." Harris is scornful of lily-livered liberalism. "We've
got more compassion for animals than for people," she tuts. "We have
campaigns to spay cats to prevent them from having unwanted kittens, yet we
allow these women to have litters of 14 children." She is at great pains to
point out that it is not the women she's interested in. "Adults have a
choice, the babies don't," she insists. And as far as she's concerned, the
whole reproductive and financial transaction can be done by post.

Neat and tidy, with the emotion cropped out. Step one: go to your local
family planning clinic. Step two: get sterilised. Step three: post off the
relevant form from the clinic to prove you're incapable of reproducing and,
step four, the organisation posts you your $200.

"If they want the cash urgently," Harris says, "they'll come to the office,
but most of them I don't even see. It's all done by mail." But what about
counselling to ensure women are making the right decision or support once
they have done the deed and waved goodbye to their fertility forever?
"Counselling? That's not what we do," Harris says precisely, fielding the
difficult questions unblinkingly. It is easy to forget she is relatively
new to activism.

Before being struck by the yearning to alter the social fabric, Harris was
a waitress. "I never had much interest in politics," she shrugs. "It always
struck me that politicians care more about how long they can stay in office
than what they can do while they are there." Even now, Harris is reluctant
to classify herself politically: all that matters, she says, is preventing
unwanted babies coming into the world to face a miserable life. Although
drug abuse disproportionately affects poor people, who are
disproportionately black, she won't accept that some will interpret her
scheme as a kind of ethnic as well as socio-economic cleansing; indeed, her
own life would make it difficult to pigeonhole her as a redneck. She is
white, her husband is black and between them they have 10 children: one of
hers, three of his, two together and four adopted drug babies.

It was these drug babies who helped Harris form her ideas. She and her
husband adopted a baby girl to add to their all-boy progeny - the fifth
child born to a drug-using mother. And then they got annual phone calls
from social services, asking if they would take the next three siblings to
be born. They agreed. But "by the time we'd got our fourth baby from this
woman, I was very angry that she was allowed to keep on giving birth every
year and then to abandon her babies." Harris decided to take action. "If
you're willing to complain about a problem, you'd better be willing to
solve it," she says brightly. She persuaded a local politician to draft a
bill calling for mandatory, long-term birth control for these women. It
failed, so she decided she'd have to do things herself. Thus Crack was
born.

The pay-offs to drug addicts are funded by a range of sponsors including,
according to Harris, the Duchess of Bedford who lives in New Mexico. In
just a year, Harris has amassed $65,000 dollars in private donations. Her
energy is boundless and her sincerity shines through. "I'm saving taxpayers
millions of dollars by stopping some of these babies being born," she says.
"I'm making a difference and I feel good about myself. There is no rational
reason to allow these women to keep on having babies. Too many people have
kids who have no business having them. I'm real critical about that. In
America, everyone has the right to do anything they want to do. Sometimes I
think our rights will be our biggest downfall."

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson