Paying drug addicts to sterlize themselves?

BARBARA DAVIES: Should drug addicts be paid to be sterilised?

By Barbara Davies
Last updated at 1:01 AM on 28th April 2010

After adopting four crack-addicted babies, born one after the other to the same mother, Barbara Harris came up with a big idea. 'All I ever heard was people talking about the rights of the addict,' she says. 'No one was talking about the rights of babies born to those addicted mothers.'

At the time, Harris was working as a parttime waitress, and decided to start a scheme to pay drug addicts in America to be either sterilised or to commit to long-term contraception. It's an initiative that has appalled those of a liberal bent.

But, at the same time, it has garnered support from those who believe such drastic action is the only way to combat the crippling social problems that come with drug abuse.

So far, about 1,200 women and 50 men have accepted money to be sterilised in America. This week, 20 years on, Harris has brought her charity Project Prevention to Britain. Addicts who want to accept her offer of £200 must be sterilised or fitted with a contraceptive implant - anything that will assure her they will not be able to get pregnant.

'It's a very common-sense, simple approach to a serious problem,' the 57-yearold told me yesterday. If you are going to pay a woman not to abuse a child, this is the best £200 you can spend. Money is a great motivator for these addicts,' she acknowledges.

'These women made a conscious choice at one point in their lives to do drugs; these babies did not get offered that choice. Nobody has the right to force their drug addiction on an innocent child.'

Inevitably, Harris's views have already provoked heated rows.

This week, she was whipping up a storm of controversy in the UK, leading the head of one of Britain's largest drug charities to call her practices 'morally reprehensible and irrelevant'.

Yet such criticism means little to a woman who has likened addict mothers to dogs giving birth to litters: 'We don't allow dogs to breed like this, we spay and neuter them,' she says, with a characteristic bluntness that has made her an easy target for those who claim that what she is advocating amounts to little more than social engineering.

'It's not OK to abuse children,' she says. Now, Harris appears to be winning tentative support in Britain, where about 2,000 babies are born each year to drug-addicted mothers. Many are born underweight, with life-threatening conditions. If they remain with their mothers, they are often caught in a cycle of drug-taking and gang warfare; if not, they face a life in care. Either way, says Harris, it's a bleak future.
No choice: Mrs Harris repeatedly makes the point that children of drug addicts have no choice in the matter

She claims to have been inundated with emails from Britons praising her approach - not least from social workers overloaded with case files of drug addicts' children.

One supporter from Yorkshire wrote to her: 'Too many young people have lives blighted from the day they are conceived. Where are their human rights?' And another: 'At last, a common-sense approach: no judgment, no politics, just a simple solution to a terrible problem.'

Harris's UK launch has been funded largely by a British businessman who donated £13,000 to her cause, with the promise of more.

But while few would disagree with Harris's belief that the child should come before its addicted parents, her approach raises far-reaching questions about the extent to which society should interfere in people's right to have a child.

In America, where 69,000 children are born to addicts each year, her programme has been likened by some to Nazi eugenics.

'What she's doing reminds me of Hitler,' is how Dr Xylina Bean of Martin Luther King Drew Medical Centre in Los Angeles described it. 'She's decided a sector of society is not entitled to a basic human right - reproduction.'

To which Harris retorts: 'I don't understand why anyone thinks it's controversial. I met a woman in New York who had 21 children in care. What right does she have to destroy the lives of 21 children just because she had the right to procreate? What's humane about that?

'How is it helping these women for someone to fight for their right to have babies? How is that caring for

If I was on drugs and having a baby every year who was taken away from me, I would hope that someone would step up and say: "You are irresponsible. You are hurting innocent children and you are not going to do it any more."'

'And I wouldn't care what they did to me because that wouldn't be as big a regret to me as it would if nobody did anything.

'It's a huge burden for these women when they come off drugs to see that they destroyed the lives of several children. It's money well spent because they can concentrate on other things in their lives, like getting clean.'

Nor does Harris accept that she doesn't care about the long-term welfare of the addicts she pays to be sterilised. This money, say her detractors, will undoubtedly be spent on drugs.

Harris accepts this may be true. 'That's their choice. The babies don't have a choice,' is her brusque response.
Each time an addict is sterilised, a doctor sends Harris confirmation. She does refer addicts to drug agencies, and insists many stay in contact with her. 'I get letters from them. One wrote and said: "Thank you for helping me do the first responsible thing I have done in my addiction."'

Each time an addict is sterilised, a doctor sends Harris confirmation. She does refer addicts to drug agencies, and insists many stay in contact with her. 'I get letters from them. One wrote and said: "Thank you for helping me do the first responsible thing I have done in my addiction."'

If any of the women manage to get off drugs and then regret having been sterilised, Harris promises to pay for it to be reversed.

'It hasn't happened yet,' she says. 'But Project Prevention would pay for it if we were satisfied they were really off drugs.'

Such comments have done little to reassure those who work with Britain's addicts. Simon Antrobus, chief executive of Addaction, one of the UK's largest providers of drug treatment, says there was 'no place' for Harris's organisation in the UK.

'Sex education and contraceptive advice is part of drug treatment work in this country,' he says. 'Women who use drugs can access contraception free on the NHS, including long-term options.

'Our first-hand experience shows that people can make positive changes with the right support. Many of our clients stopped using drugs because they became a parent.

'Too many children are growing up with drug-using parents, but working with the family helps stop drug use and improves a child's prospects dramatically.'

Harris has raised four children of a drug addict within her own family. Would she apply her views about drug addicts' children to her adopted drug babies, who have grown into flourishing young adults?

Her eldest adopted daughter, Destiny, was asked that very question in a newspaper interview. According to Harris: 'She said if she'd had to grow up like many of the children of addicts she sees growing up then she'd rather not have been born.

'We've devoted our lives to them. They are productive members of society. They know they are loved and cared for. And that's not what every child gets.'

Married to a surgical technician, Harris gave birth to six sons, now aged between 28 and 39, before adopting Destiny, now 20, from a crack addict. The woman in question had already given birth to four other children who by then were adrift in the care system.

Four months after taking Destiny from a foster home, Harris was asked to take another baby from the same woman, then another and another. Isaiah is now 19, Taylor 18 and Terrell 17. She says: 'I kept praying she wouldn't have any more because I knew I'd have to take them. To me they were all family. Destiny suffered delayed development because she had crack cocaine and heroin in her system. '

Destiny and her siblings may have been fortunate, but surely they are also proof perhaps that even a child born in the most dire of circumstances can enjoy a happy and fulfilling life. More troubling than anything is the question of where the line should be drawn - what factors should be used to decide the circumstances under which it is right for a child to be born?

Harris says: 'Africa has babies born with AIDS from their mothers. Wouldn't it be more humane to pay for birth control for all these women so they don't give birth to another infant who has AIDS. Look at the suffering - no one has the nerve to speak up.'

There's no doubt Barbara Harris has provoked a fierce debate.

Yesterday, she received her first UK call, a message from a man she believes was inquiring about being paid to have a vasectomy. How many more in this country make the same kind of life-changing call and take advantage of the money remains to be seen.

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