Sterilization Program Revisits Eugenics Issue     1/10/2003
Poor women targeted for sterilization campaign
By Tanya L. Green

Poor women targeted for sterilization campaign

A group that is paying drug-addicted women $200 in exchange for sterilization or long-term birth control has set up shop in New York City in October, amid a firestorm of charges of racism and selective breeding. The group also offers vasectomies to drug-addicted men for the same price.

Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity’s (CRACK), also know as Project Prevention, founder, Barbara Harris of Orange County, California, said the mission of her organization is “common sense,” The New York Times reported.

“Why should a drug or alcoholic addict get pregnant?” Harris asks. “I watched how my children suffered when I brought them home from the hospital, and no child should go through that.” She said children born to drug addicts regularly suffer emotional scars and medical disabilities and end up in foster care at the taxpayers’ expense.

“A woman who is a crack addict needs drug treatment,” said Michael Schwartz, Concerned Women for America’s vice president for government relations. “And since it is a criminal offense to possess or use crack, the right thing to do is to arrest and charge her, and then give her the option of going into treatment or standing trial and going to prison.”

Harris, who founded the group in 1997, is the mother of six biological children and four adopted black children. Her critics call her a racist, but she said more white women than black have availed themselves herself of her group’s services.

“To assume that they’re all black is more racist that they could ever accuse me of,” Harris told The Washington Times. “Black babies matter, too. And even if it were all black people, is that unacceptable?”

Harrris’ logic reeks of eugenics, particularly of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s infamous Negro Project. The purpose of the program was to control the birth rate of certain segments of the black population. Opponents, who say the real mission of CRACK is selective breeding, point to Harris’ quote in the December 1998 edition of Marie Claire—which is eerily reminiscent of Sanger’s “human weeds” description of the “unfit.”

“We don’t allow dogs to breed,” Harris is quoted saying. “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 …”

“What she’s doing is suggesting there are certain neighborhoods where it is dangerous for some people to be reproducing,” said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women in The New York Times. “It suggests they are not worthy of reproducing. It is very much like the eugenics history in America.”

Asia Tepper is a Brooklyn resident who learned about CRACK two years ago through a radio program and volunteered to run the New York chapter. She spends many evenings and weekends scouting “prostitution-infected areas” carrying fliers and handouts.

“To me it’s about the children,” Tepper said. “It’s about preventing a child from being born in what is not the best environment.”

Dr. Van Dunn, the chief medical officer of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which overseas hospitals in all five boroughs, told The Washington Times that he opposed CRACK’s methods because sterilization is irreversible.

“Offering a woman, a poor woman, money to give up her reproductive rights is unethical,” he said.

Opponents also say CRACK misses the real issue—helping the women get treatment for their addiction.

Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, senior fellow of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, says the CRACK people need to work on the real problem, drug addiction, rather than focus on the results of the problem, promiscuity and pregnancy. Further, Crouse adds, “Our culture continues to look for the so-called easy solutions when time and again we’ve discovered that band-aids just don’t work. We have to offer transformed lives through the power of the Gospel—anything short of that just exacerbates the basic issue and creates even more problems.”

Schwartz adds that redemptive programs address other aspects of addiction as well. “In treatment or in prison, the woman is of no economic value to any of her exploiters,” Schwartz said. “The drug pushers lose a customer, and so do the pimps who want to turn her into a public utility. In the United States, drug addiction is the driving force behind prostitution.”

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