VOLUNTARY STERILIZATION CAN SERVE GOOD PURPOSE

A controversial program that has drawn outrage for paying drug addicts
and alcoholics to get sterilized or be put on long-term birth control
brings its activity to Honolulu this week. Critics have called it
unethical to bribe women to make an irreversible decision, but it has
been worthwhile in preventing the birth of children with drug-created
problems to parents unable to deal with them.

Project Prevention, originally named Children Requiring a Caring
Kommunity, or Crack, will complete its distribution of fliers in
Honolulu tomorrow, offering what would be out-of-bounds if offered by
government agencies. Barbara Harris, who founded and now is executive
director of the project, aims to keep medical disabilities and
emotional problems from being passed to the next generation.

Harris' unvarnished candor has created much of the strong
reaction.

"We don't allow dogs to breed," she told the British edition of Marie
Claire magazine in 1998. "We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep
them from having unwanted children, and yet these women are literally
having litters of children."

Her critics, led by National Advocates for Pregnant Women, were quick
to respond, comparing the statement to that of Nazis who "said if you
just sterilized the sick people and Jews you would improve the economy."

The main difference, of course, is that the women signing up for
Project Prevention do so voluntarily.

Critics respond further that the project is no more than a bribe to
women to make an irreversible decision rather than subject themselves
to counseling and drug-addiction treatment. But it is their right to
make such a choice.

Harris began the project in 1997 in Orange County, Calif., after she
and her husband adopted four children from the same drug-addicted
mother. Thirteen years later, her project has paid up to $300 each to
more than 3,242 clients, including 29 men, who provided drug arrest
records or a doctor's letter confirming they use addictive drugs in
return for subjecting themselves to ligations, vasectomies or other
long-term birth-prevention devices. They must then document their
completion of the medical procedure.

Accusations that the project is racist are unfounded. Of their clients
in 39 states, 1,600 are Caucasian, 884 African-Americans, 418 Hispanic
and 340 of other ethnicities, far off the general population's race
percentages but a more realistic reflection of those troubled with
drug addiction and alcoholism.

Assigning such a policy to a government agency could cause concern
about its propriety. Harris' relatively small operation serves a good
purpose in providing an appropriate alternative in extreme cases.