Not everyone who has a child is capable of taking care of it, of meeting all its needs, emotional and physical. Is it a basic human right to reproduce? Or should some people who are clearly not in a position to have and raise a baby be encouraged not to conceive in the first place? What if these people were paid to be sterilised? Well, so far, 3500 drug addicts in the USA have been – they were all paid to have vasectomies or tubal ligations, rendering them permanently infertile.
Barbara Harris is the director and founder of the US-based Project Protection. According to their website:
She has her daddy’s eyes and her mother’s heroin addiction
The main objective of Project Prevention is public awareness to the problem of addicts/alcoholics exposing their unborn child to drugs during pregnancy.
Project Prevention seeks to reduce the burden of this social problem on taxpayers, trim down social worker caseloads, and alleviate from our clients the burden of having children that will potentially be taken away.
Unlike incarceration, Project Prevention extremely cost effective and does not punish the participants.
We seek and welcome alliances with all sectors of our communities including drug treatment programs, hospitals, social service departments, among others, and have established such contacts throughout the United States.
Project Prevention does not have the resources to combat the national problems of poverty, housing, nutrition, education and rehabilitation services. Those resources we do have are spent to PREVENT a problem for $300 rather than paying millions after it happens in cost to care for a potentially damaged child.
Barbara Harris
Simple really – they don’t claim to have the money to solve the drug problems or the problems that lead to poverty but they feel they have the resources to stop it from spreading- by paying people not to have babies. Men are paid to have vasectomies and women to have sterilisations or tubal ligations. They are not paid a fortune, but they are paid cash and to a drug addict on the street – money talks.
The international media have picked up this story and are portraying Barbara Harris as a drug addict hating zealot. ABC Online reports
A 38-year-old man has become the first drug addict in the United Kingdom to become part of a “cash-for-vasectomy” program.
The US-based charity Project Prevention says addicts are not fit to breed and is offering 200 pounds (about $322) in exchange for sterilisation.
Its founder, Barbara Harris, a middle-aged American woman, is now trawling the streets of north London looking for volunteers.
She has been described as a Nazi who offers bribes for babies’ lives. “We offer drug addicts and alcoholics a cash incentive of 200 pounds if they use long-term birth control,” she said.
But behind the headlines, Harris’s main stated aim is to get addicts to use long term birth control until they have their drug habit under control.
Project Prevention does not just walk around the streets sterilising women randomly. They only offer tubal ligation to women who have had children. Barbara attests that out of the last 20 women they have offered sterilisation to, the women have had between them 120 pregnancies. Yes you read that correct – 120 pregnancies between them BEFORE the tubal ligation, they have given birth 6 times and have 4 living children on average.
And then there is this – an extract from a letter written to Project Prevention from a woman who was paid to be sterilised:
…..And these wonderful protesters say, “Let the addicted woman/man keep reproducing at will!!!” I guess not too many of them have been around drug exposed children. What’s funny is, that my children are first generation crack babies. Their behavior is unpredictable, violent and definitely anti-social. They are not at fault, they have been born that way. When they are not “going off” they are smart, loveable kids, but more often than not, they are off on a tangent. My children aren’t the only ones, and to a certain extent they were lucky. I know of other addicts who babies were born horribly deformed, with AIDS or HIV positive, flat out and out hopelessly retarded, and physically disabled.
I’m not saying that these babies don’t have a right to exist. I love my babies as best I can, from a distance. When you think of the long-term costs escalating behind pregnant addicts…..? Look at the infant intensive care costs, the special education costs, the court costs, the shuffling of the poor baby through the system, the loss of brain-power potential, the lack of emotional stability of the drug exposed child. Some say that I’m being too harsh, but I have a right to speak on this subject, because me and mine areLIVING THE NIGHTMARE DAILY!!!
I wish someone would have tied my tubes back then or installed an IUD in me, by hook or by crook.
When you hear from your detractors again, talking about genocide, tell ’em to go and take care of some of these babies, and many of these children are quite beautiful, it’s the peculiarities of the behavior and emotional instability will break the hardest heart.
It’s also important to know that the use of crack is known to kill all maternal instinct. I do not know much about methamphetamines, nor heroine, they were not my drugs of choice. I know about alcohol, Olde English, Cisco and the like. An addict woman will cradle her pipe before she cradles her own child. I know, I speak from experience. The stark truth is that most addicts/alcoholics will never get it together, they just continue on, only interrupted by stays in jails, prisons, mental institutions, and “rest stops” in recovery homes. Only to come out, looking good, got the loved ones all hopeful, just to step back off the planet. I’ve known women to have only drug babies, and plenty of them, back to back to back. I’ve known a woman who kept relapsing, getting pregnant, having a drug baby, sober up, can’t stand reality, and go back out, end up pregnant again. Pitiful, huh?
Is sterilisation not a more humane approach than repeated pregnancies, miscarriages, still births and unwanted births?
Top Comments
The rights of the unborn child should be respected over the rights of the drug addict to reproduce. It is not a question of a 'burden on society' so much as it is a question of ruining the life of the inevitably neglected child who has a drug-addicted parent.
Parenting is the hardest and most important job on earth and drug-addicts cannot be trusted to do this job competently. It's harsh - but the life of a precious child is at stake.
This is a great idea.