GIVE THEM SOME DIGNITY

Anti-CRACK Campaign Offers Real Choices To Would-Be Mothers

"We don't allow dogs to breed. 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."

These words, quoted out of Marie Claire magazine, belong to Barbara Harris,
a middle-aged white woman in Orange County, California, who founded
Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (CRACK).

CRACK is a national population-control organization that offers $200 cash
to folks who struggle with chemical addiction to undergo sterilization or
long-term birth control. CRACK's mission is to "save our welfare system and
the world from the exorbitant cost to the taxpayer for each drug-addicted
birth" by offering "preventive measures to reduce the tragedy of numerous
drug-affected births." Since its inception, CRACK has enrolled almost 800
women around the country. Its Seattle chapter, called Positive Prevention,
has posted flyers around town saying "Get Birth Control Get Ca$h."

CRACK's strategy of paying women substance users for sterilization
contributes to a problem larger than their drug use: the lack of support
for parenting and pregnant women struggling with substance addiction in a
climate where the "War on Drugs" demonizes them as undeserving and unfit,
and labels their offspring "a burden to society."

Since the winter of 2000, shortly after Positive Prevention arose, a small
group of activists has been organizing in the Seattle area to oppose the
organization. Housed at Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), the
anti-CRACK campaign got its start during a community gathering for the
Black People's Project (BPP). Activists expressed outrage that a message to
curb the reproductive capabilities of people struggling with substance
abuse disproportionately targeted Black women, other women of color, and
poor women. They noted that all of the ads were located near or in the rear
of the buses, and that the buses were routed through areas where large
numbers of people of color and poor people lived.

The activists created a sticker campaign that offered information about the
history of sterilization abuse and the assaults on the reproductive rights
of women with disabilities, immigrant women, poor women, women of color,
and women who are survivors of sexual and physical violence. The next step
for the activists was to generate public discussions by sponsoring public
forums on the dangers of population-control efforts by groups like CRACK.

Eventually the work of the local anti-CRACK campaign began to gain
momentum. As new members joined, we developed an information packet called
the CRACK Pack, gained the support of workers at local feminist women's
healthcare agencies, and got national recognition and allegiance with other
organizations that also oppose CRACK, including the Committee On Women
Population and the Environment, the American Public Health Association,
Family Watch, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. The activists
also developed a statement of opposition to CRACK/Positive Prevention
modeled after a similar statement issued by Family Watch
(www.familywatch.org) that became an effective tool for gauging public
support for our anti-CRACK campaign.

At local public forums, people brought attention to the similarities
between CRACK and other movements in U.S. history that attempted to control
the population of oppressed people: the lynching period (1865-1965), and
the Eugenics movement (circa 1907-1941). Specifically, the Eugenics
movement "advocated the rational control of reproduction in order to
improve society," says law professor Dorothy Roberts in her book Killing
the Black Body. This resembles the position CRACK takes today. Racism was a
part of Eugenics' theoretical framework, proposing that "deviant behavior
was biologically determined." Groups like CRACK echo past eugenics ideas by
"warning of the dangerous potential inherent in the notion that social
problems are caused by reproduction and can be curbed by population
control" strategies.

This is not unlike statements made by Ella Sonnenberg, one of the founders
of Positive Prevention. In a Seattle Weekly interview, Sonnenberg states,
"It seems to me that birth control is just a simple idea that would solve
the whole problem." Sonnenberg goes on to state that she would rather spend
"two hundred dollars to prevent such a disaster - where a child is born
with a lot of birth defects, maybe HIV-positive, and then after they get
out of intensive care the parents don't get them back out of the hospital
and they end up in foster homes or in prison... a child born drug exposed
is doomed to fail."

What Sonnenberg's position fails to reflect is that it is highly unlikely
for women who are known to have drug addictions to an illegal substance to
even keep their babies once the child has been born in a hospital. It is
often the case that Child Protective Services removes the child from the
mother's care shortly after delivery.

Joelle Brouner community organizer at CARA and founder of the Disability
Pride Project, sheds light on the concept of the "damaged baby."

"The damaged-baby image establishes that infants born to drug-using mothers
are worth less, and that the diminished worth is based on the assumption
that these babies will experience short- and long-term health effects based
on their parent's drug use," she says. Brouner points out that the
potentially extensive medical needs of the baby due to birth defects is
something that negatively impacts the broader public.

"The assumption is based on really old thinking: that people with
disabilities are more likely to be criminal, have poor character, and be a
burden to society," Brouner argues. Brouner describes a Nazi propaganda
poster that features a large Aryan farmer holding a scale across his back
with a person with disabilities on each side of the scale. At the bottom of
the poster, in bold letters, the German word for "burden" is printed.

"Similar to this poster, CRACK's image of a damaged baby on their website
projects the idea that people with disabilities need to be taken care of.
This image of babies with disabilities that become burdens is something
that the broader society begins to loathe because caring for them takes too
much energy and resources." If we become a society that never learns to
support people with additional needs, the result is a collection of
disconnected people who are in proximity to each other, rather than a
community of people who value interdependence.

So, what would it mean to actually work towards reducing the number of
drug-exposed births? As a society, we could begin with supporting pregnant
and parenting women. Among the possibilities:

— Strive to see the connections between stress, racism, and infant health.
"Things like change of residence, bills that cannot be paid, the death of
someone close, and domestic and sexual violence are contributing factors to
the stress of pregnant women," according to the Pregnancy Risk Assessment
Monitoring System, a survey new mothers statewide by public health advocate
Maria Carlos.

— Do a better job caring for women who survive sexual and physical
violence. The United States Department of Justice shows that rape victims
with post-traumatic stress disorder are 26 times more likely to have two or
more major serious drug abuse problems than non-victims.

— Protect the most vulnerable. The National Black Women's Health Project
shows that young urban women of color who've been divorced or separated
experience the highest rates of rape. Poor women and women of color are
more likely to experience sexual violence, more likely to have
post-traumatic stress disorder, and more likely to have drug abuse problems
as a result. Further, poor women often turn to drug-related income sources
to support their family in situations of crisis. They are more likely than
men to engage in sex work or sell drugs in order to gain resources to
finance their addiction or to feed their families.

— Prepare for drug-affected babies. Very few drug treatment centers offer
neonatal care. Thus, women struggling with addiction are almost at a
complete loss as to what to do when they become pregnant.

Drug treatment centers are losing support as we saw with local drug
treatment center Street Outreach Services being forced out of its downtown
location earlier this year. Besides neonatal care, few, if any, drug
treatment centers offer prenatal care or childcare. CARA feels that it is
critical to support pregnant and parenting women who are drug users. The
answer to solving the problem of children born drug exposed is not to give
money to women to not reproduce, but instead spend money on drug treatment
that supports pregnant and parenting women.

To help CRACK lose steam, critics must support real solutions for women and
their families including providing necessary resources such as food,
housing, free or low cost health care, prenatal care, child care, and
accessible drug treatment. We can help find these resources by continuing
to pressure local, state, and national representatives to divest from the
War on Drugs, take funds out of counter-productive institutions like
prisons, stay away from racist quick-fix strategies, and invest deeply in
long term sustainable strategies for women and our communities.

Theryn Kigvamasud-Vashti is the Community Organizer with the Black People's
Project and Communities Against Rape and Abuse (http://www.cara-seattle.org).<