Old News: Addicts Get Cash to Sterilize

I was reading some of the commentaries from one of the mailing list websites I subscribe: The Internet Party (www.theinternetparty.org). TIP is a really intriguing website, and I have found the ideas therein fascinating. My thoughts follow the article.

Surgical Strike
Is a group that pays addicts to be sterilized defending children or exploiting the vulnerable? Barry Yeoman
November/December 2001

Barbara Harris was eager to become a foster mother when she received a call from a social worker in 1990, asking her to take in an eight-month-old girl born to a woman addicted to crack cocaine. Harris, a waitress at a pancake house, agreed.

Over the next two years, she and her husband provided a foster home in Orange County, California, for three more children born to the same woman, including one boy who suffered violently from his mother's addiction.

"He shook," Harris recalls. "His eyes looked like they would pop out of his head. He'd sleep a few minutes and he'd wake up screaming."

Harris decided something needed to be done to prevent drug-addicted women from getting pregnant. So in 1997 she sat down at her family's computer, created some flyers, and posted them in the impoverished MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. That was the birth of CRACK (Children Requiring A Caring Kommunity), a nonprofit oganization that offers $200 in cash to addicts who agree to be sterilized or undergo long-term contraception like Norplant, which is surgically imbedded under the skin.

Because crack targets the poor, most of the procedures are funded by taxpayers through federal and state programs such as Medicaid and California's Medi-Cal.

Now in its fourth year, CRACK is growing rapidly. The group has chapters in 22 cities across the country, including Seattle, Dallas, and Chicago, and has already handed out more than $100,000 in cash rewards to 500 clients.

"The best is yet to come!" boasts the organization's Web site. "Every day we receive phone calls from men and women nationwide that want to make the responsible choice."

The election is long past, but purely from a political standpoint this woman's actions should alarm the Democratic Party's intelligentsia. I guess you could look at this from a number of angles, some of which I'll explore briefly, but the bottom line is that curtailing any increase in the nation's poor effectively reduces a large segment of the Democratic voter base.

Democratic politicians rely on an uninformed constituency, especially those who are completely dependent upon government programs. By sterilizing one source of likely voters, Harris is making an impact on local, state, and presidential elections in decades to come.

Some other things to think about:

Social Services – By reducing the influx of drug-addicted infants, Harris is also reducing the strain on the limited resources of her community’s health and social services. This should cause some concern for the DNC since shifting tax revenue to take care of these issues is a popular tactic.

Education – Fewer kids mean the schools in Harris’ community will be less crowded. The children of drug addicts seldom score well on standardized tests, which means that public schools will perform better overall. The impact here is clear: Democratic politicians will find it increasingly difficult to point to education policy on the campaign trail or find reasons to throw money at these problems while in office.

Crime – Face it. Crime is a function of population density, especially in those cases where dwindling resources can affect frequency almost exponentially. This issue really goes both ways since crime is a popular issue for both Republicans and Democrats depending on the circumstances, i.e., which side happens to be in office.