Project Prevention
May 5, 2012 7:39 PM   Subscribe

Should addicts be sterilized? “What makes a woman’s right to procreate more important than the right of a child to have a normal life?” Project Prevention founder Barbara Harris told Time magazine in 2010. The question is entirely rhetorical: her self-professed mission in life is to zero out the number of births to parents who abuse illegal drugs, particularly crack cocaine. “Even if these babies are fortunate enough not to have mental or physical disabilities, they’re placed in the foster-care system and moved from home to home,” she says.
posted by bookman117 (59 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: This is actually the fifth time this woman and her organization has been posted here over the years, and this version offers very little new info. Perhaps something that's not a retread of the same thing if there's a larger picture this might fit into? -- taz



 
We could also, you know, try and fix foster care.
posted by lumensimus at 7:42 PM on May 5, 2012 [13 favorites]


Should people with horrendous political positions be sterilized? Even if their children are fortunate enough to not have birth defects they may still be forced to run for office.
posted by munchingzombie at 7:46 PM on May 5, 2012 [22 favorites]


I think we should focus on ensuring proper treatment for substance addiction; in certain cases I think sterilization might help prevent foreseeable problems, but I feel uncomfortable assigning that task and right to government.
posted by clockzero at 7:52 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


I honestly don't understand a consistent position that women must be allowed to choose abortion whenever they like because it is their own body that they are controlling, but that some women must not choose to be sterilized because they are not responsible enough/sober enough to make that decision.

I can't say I find Project Prevention's tactics tasteful - especially the ones in Haiti described in the article. That said, it seems to me that if we respect a woman's right to choose, we also respect a woman's right to choose to have themselves sterilized, even if the decision is influenced by Project Prevention.
posted by saeculorum at 7:52 PM on May 5, 2012 [3 favorites]


not only is it a terrible idea, this person obviously hasn't read the science on the issue since the 90s.

Fears were widespread that a generation of crack babies were going to put severe strain on society and social services as they grew up. Later studies failed to substantiate the findings of earlier ones that PCE has severe disabling consequences; these earlier studies had been methodologically flawed (e.g. with small sample sizes and confounding factors). Scientists have come to understand that the findings of the early studies were vastly overstated and that most people who were exposed to cocaine in utero do not have disabilities
npr via wiki

fetal alcohol syndrome has been found to be far worse than prenatal cocaine exposure.
posted by nadawi at 7:54 PM on May 5, 2012 [18 favorites]


We must be officially out of problems if we're focusing on this end of the problem.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:55 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]




Maybe the right to have children should be a bit more provisional even for people who aren't addicts and other *cough* scum.
posted by localroger at 7:55 PM on May 5, 2012 [4 favorites]


I think there's a pretty clear difference between providing women with the opportunity to choose longterm birth control or sterilization, and paying addicted women $300 to get sterilized or putting up signs saying "Take birth control get ca$h" in homeless centers, especially when the stated perspective of the founder of the organization is:

“We don’t allow dogs to breed. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children,” Barbara Harris says.

There's a difference between having the choice to get an affordable longterm birth control solution, choosing sterilization, coercing women into being sterilized by giving them money to feed a drug habit, and ensuring that women have the choice to abort fetuses. It's kind of ridiculous to conflate all of these things.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:57 PM on May 5, 2012 [10 favorites]


"particularly crack cocaine"

Thanks for clearing up the whole "is this person a gigantic racist" issue. If "sterilizing undesirable people" wasn't a tip-off, then it's a slam dunk that she's got in her gunsights crack cocaine, the particular type of cocaine which is identical in effects to the cocaine which is used mostly by rich white people, but is used mostly by poor black people.

And leveraging people's economic disadvantage to incentivize them to remove themselves from the gene pool? PRICELESS. That's got that glorious Libertarian "it doesn't matter what you manipulate people to do by means of their dire economic straits, it's a Free Choice by Free Agents in a Free Market(TM)" zing.

This is just ten pounds of right wing evil in a five pound bag. A+++ would eugenicize again!
posted by edheil at 7:58 PM on May 5, 2012 [44 favorites]


Everyone should be sterilised. We need to be stopped.
posted by Decani at 7:58 PM on May 5, 2012 [14 favorites]


I would be A-OK using my tax dollars to give addicts access to birth control, including something like that stick thing in the arm to help avoid unwanted pregnancy. And if it was the woman's idea and she was of sound mind, even sterilization should be an option for her. I'd also be OK with funding abortions.

I am also A-OK with using my tax dollars for addiction treatment programs off the drugs so there's fewer "crack babies" as well.

What I don't like is the idea of sterilization with a bounty in the terms it is presented in the article. A desperate addict may see the money as the motivator more than the unwanted pregnancy and may regret her decision after she's cleaned herself up.

The way this is framed it sounds more like a "let's not let the undesirables breed" solution than a real "won't someone think of the children" solution.

and wtf Salon? your new red color scheme hurts my eyes.
posted by birdherder at 7:58 PM on May 5, 2012 [3 favorites]


America has been down this dark and terrible road before

"We thought for a long time that we belonged there, that we were not part of the species. We thought we were some kind of, you know, people that wasn't supposed to be born," says Boyce.

And that was precisely the idea.

The Fernald School, and others like it, was part of a popular American movement in the early 20th century called the Eugenics movement. The idea was to separate people considered to be genetically inferior from the rest of society, to prevent them from reproducing.

Eugenics is usually associated with Nazi Germany, but in fact, it started in America. Not only that, it continued here long after Hitler's Germany was in ruins.

At the height of the movement - in the '20s and '30s - exhibits were set up at fairs to teach people about eugenics. It was good for America, and good for the human race. That was the message."
posted by Blasdelb at 7:59 PM on May 5, 2012 [5 favorites]


I have no problem with this in concept, as long as it's a private incentive and not a requirement. I'm not against social programs at all, but we have to admit this: They do in some ways incentivize having kids. Maybe not unlimited kids, but I've had times where I thought, you know, if I got pregnant now, I would suddenly be eligible for housing assistance, food assistance, Medicaid, that just being single and poor doesn't get you at all. Something like this could balance the system a bit. Allow people to make slightly better choices either way.

The part that makes me ill is the fact that this lady is on a prevent-the-crack-babies crusade long after that should have been an issue, and it's fairly obvious that it's because the "bad drugs" of today are much more likely to be used by white women, and that you do not get conservatives to pony up donations to convince white women to use birth control or get sterilized.
posted by gracedissolved at 8:03 PM on May 5, 2012 [2 favorites]


from the article:

“We don’t allow dogs to breed. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children,” Barbara Harris says.

this isn't about a right to choose - these are the same kinds of assholes who run pregnancy resource centers - they rely on bad facts to achieve their own desirable outcome out of people that need the most truth and care. if poor, addicted women were being given perfect medical care, then i wouldn't be as angry about this. but, from one side rights and support are being whittled down while on the other side the people who are helping remove the rights are seeking to control procreation from the free market side as well. this is in no one's best interest but their own fucked up, meddling agendas. if they would stop opposing reproductive choice and care, a lot of what they claim they want would be solved.
posted by nadawi at 8:03 PM on May 5, 2012 [3 favorites]


I would be A-OK using my tax dollars to give addicts access to birth control, including something like that stick thing in the arm to help avoid unwanted pregnancy. And if it was the woman's idea and she was of sound mind, even sterilization should be an option for her. I'd also be OK with funding abortions.

So, socialized healthcare. Which, in any way you could mention, seems a more sensible and humane approach than targeting vulnerable women for sterilization because of their "unfitness." Especially healthcare that included not only birth control, but treatment for addiction.

Instead of seeing a pregnant woman with an addiction as babyhating scum who deserves to have her body surgically altered, imagine what could be done if we treated her as a person with an illness who also happened to be pregnant, and helped her.

But then, how could we continue to feel superior and tell ourselves it's all about the babeez?
posted by emjaybee at 8:07 PM on May 5, 2012 [10 favorites]


By bribing an addict with an amount of money that for many would equal a month's wages, this program puts patients under duress and tramples over their autonomy. The $300 incentive is coercion plain and simple. As an intervention, this program would never, ever get approval by an academic institutional review board.
posted by The White Hat at 8:10 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


What a horrible person.
posted by feckless at 8:11 PM on May 5, 2012


Eugenics is usually associated with Nazi Germany, but in fact, it started in America. Not only that, it continued here long after Hitler's Germany was in ruins.

There is a 1922 book by Margaret Sanger - The pivot of Civilisation.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/abortion_eugenics/sanger/

CHAPTER IV: The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded

There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. ``We protect the members of a weak strain,'' says Davenport, ``up to the period of reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage them to leave a large progeny of `feeble-minded': which in turn, protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive period, are again set free to reproduce, and so the stupid work goes on of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strains.''
posted by rough ashlar at 8:15 PM on May 5, 2012


I can't even come up with a coherent rebuttal to this kind of obvious evil. It makes me want to puke.
posted by Scientist at 8:18 PM on May 5, 2012 [5 favorites]


We could also, you know, try and fix foster care.

I agree that this is part of the problem, but it's heartbreaking how bad the problem actually is. My wife and I do foster care regularly. One of the major issues in foster care right now is that there are so many drug exposed babies coming into the system that there are not enough qualified people to deal with the situation, much less enough people who want to invest this kind of time in a situation like this that really is nurturing to the children. And you can't just solve a problem like this with throwing more money and training at it. It's a problem of the heart, whether it's helping parents who are using drugs, or finding enough people to care for children who simply need people to love them due to a situation that is no fault of their own, and yet might have made them predisposed to certain conditions and behaviors in which they will never really get the love that they need.

This is not to say anything about the issue raised in this article. It's just to say that fixing the foster care system has to do at least in part with finding enough resources to deal with a problem with drug exposed children that are coming into the system, but I'm not sure how theoretically possible that even is right now. It's pretty mind blowing to me how big and complicated this problem actually is. A very big part of the problem does boil down to addressing the actual drug use, and the extent to which parents either are or are not held accountable. Because right now, the situation leans much more towards the are not. We had to return a girl who we had for two years to a mother who was a heroin addict and who told the court that she was not ready to take her back. We were ready to adopt her, for two years, and the court sent her back to what we were certain was an unsafe environment. It can really be heartbreaking.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:21 PM on May 5, 2012 [3 favorites]


to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants.

Yes. Levi Johnston must be stopped at all costs.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:24 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


It's just to say that fixing the foster care system has to do at least in part with finding enough resources to deal with a problem with drug exposed children that are coming into the system, but I'm not sure how theoretically possible that even is right now.

And the reality is, there aren't going to be enough resources. In this era of budget cuts, the resources that exist now are likely to dry up, at least some.

So the issues you're discussing, SpacemanStix, are only going to get worse.

Yes, Project Prevention is dangerously close to eugenics. Yes, there may well be aspects of racism inherent in it.

But yes, the problem is seeks to address is absolutely real.
posted by kgasmart at 8:26 PM on May 5, 2012


Wait what? You think people have babies just to get governmental assistance? Babies are not puppies. They cost a fortune, and there is no profit in it.
posted by Brocktoon at 8:30 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


“We don’t allow dogs to breed. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children,” Barbara Harris says.

Aspects of racism, kgasmart? Dangerously close? I'll not Godwin the thread, but jeebuz. Woman's a monster. Full stop.
posted by effugas at 8:31 PM on May 5, 2012


I don't see how there's any doubt that this is racist. Aside from dog whistles like "crack baby" and welfare queen implications, the founder has defended her position as not racist by saying "we don’t even know what color your baby will be, because often these babies come out all different colors, you know what I mean? They’re mixed.” Additionally, she hired an overseas coordinator (working to sterilize women in Kenya with HIV by promising $45 because being born with HIV is worse than being born at all) who was fired from his psychology position because he was teaching about the inherent intellectual inferiority of blacks.
posted by ChuraChura at 8:33 PM on May 5, 2012 [3 favorites]


Number of newborns born with drug addictions triples:

An increased reliance on prescription painkillers and the resulting addiction has now shown up in the most vulnerable patients — America's newborns, according to a report released Monday.

Addicted babies — many suffering from respiratory problems, low-birth weight and seizures — have nearly tripled in less than a decade.

That's one baby every hour in the U.S., according to the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said Dr. Stephen Patrick, lead author and doctor at the University of Michigan Medical Center's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Meanwhile, the number of mothers using opiates has increased fivefold, according to the same study.

It's also a burden on public-health dollars — and a wake-up call about the need for better prevention, Patrick said.


It's a burden on public-health dollars.

So the Project Prevention lady is a racist, but I say it again: the issue is real. And - once again - in an era where "public health dollars" are going to be reduced and not increased - what's the answer here?
posted by kgasmart at 8:38 PM on May 5, 2012


ChuraChura, you speak reams.

Dammit, why can't we give free long-term birth control to EVERY teenager when they ask for it? Why do we have to put children in the impossible position of having a child themselves, when many of them would do what they know they should do, they just don't have access. Believe me, many women wouldn't have kids if they could afford to prevent it. I mean afford not just financially, but emotionally--women whose husbands guilt trip or brutalize them into more kids, whose churches do the same.

Even women abusing drugs, once they realize what burden the first child is, would be willing to do what they needed to do to avoid the second--if only it wasn't made so damn hard for them.

Every female in this country of reproductive age should be able to ask individually and privately for birth control and be given it free, no questions asked. The savings would be immeasurable both in terms of money and in lives ruined.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:41 PM on May 5, 2012 [6 favorites]


Sometimes, whatever the problem, you just have to look at the solution to see that it is not a solution.
posted by unSane at 8:43 PM on May 5, 2012




Offering free sterilization to anyone who wants it is a win-win for everyone. I'm sure some drug addicts will show up for the procedure, and that's very responsible of them.
posted by Brian B. at 8:46 PM on May 5, 2012 [3 favorites]


prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants.

So they're worried about hordes of imbeciles dragging us all down? Funny how the solution is never to throw money at schools and libraries.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 8:50 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


well, one available solution is that jackasses like this stop fighting against comprehensive reproductive care and addiction recovery services.

also, to say it again - alcohol is pretty high on the list of things that fuck infants up, so why is this woman focusing on illegal drugs? and crack still isn't one of the things that causes neonatal withdrawal, so why would she even talk about crack unless she didn't know her facts and/or is more interested in population control than saving babies?
posted by nadawi at 8:55 PM on May 5, 2012 [2 favorites]


The answer to "should x be sterilized?" where x = "any group or class of human persons" is always going to be no.
posted by Cortes at 9:01 PM on May 5, 2012 [2 favorites]


I can't say I find Project Prevention's tactics tasteful - especially the ones in Haiti described in the article. That said, it seems to me that if we respect a woman's right to choose, we also respect a woman's right to choose to have themselves sterilized, even if the decision is influenced by Project Prevention.

Planned Parenthood does not pay women to have abortions. Exploiting the desperation of drug-addicted women by baiting them with money in exchange for sterilization is very different than a woman who becomes pregnant and chooses to end it for her own reasons, often in the face of oppressive legal hoops (forced ultrasounds) and societal disapproval.


gracedissolved: I'm not against social programs at all, but we have to admit this: They do in some ways incentivize having kids. Maybe not unlimited kids, but I've had times where I thought, you know, if I got pregnant now, I would suddenly be eligible for housing assistance, food assistance, Medicaid, that just being single and poor doesn't get you at all. Something like this could balance the system a bit. Allow people to make slightly better choices either way.

Have you ever actually looked into those programs to see how much they offer and how easy it is to get in? Or are you just buying into the "welfare queen" trope? Let's check out the amazing benefits I could get in Pennsylvania for having a kid:

Housing
In Pennsylvania, I can get a voucher or public housing. To get a voucher I need to make less than $18,800/year. There is also a waitlist. Which is so full it is closed indefinitely.

But hey, let's go with public housing! OK, also a waitlist! Which as of a year ago had 53,000 names on it. Oh, and I have to submit a separate application to each site--where a "site" is either an apartment building or one of the 10 offices managing individual housing units. And they're only open Monday-Friday, 9-2. I hope I don't have a job!

Medical
I can get women's healthcare--if I stay not pregnant. I get Medicaid for as long as I'm pregnant. After that I get nothing. I can apply to an insurance program offered for low-income adults, but there is a five-year waiting list and they are phasing it out. My kid can get health insurance, but that doesn't really benefit me because I'm having the baby so I can live off the government.

Food
Food assistance is available to single people, don't need a baby for that. But I do get MORE if I have a baby! Provided I make less than $19,000 I can get food stamps--but to get the maximum benefit of $367 (yowza!) I need to make less than $15,000.

Cash Assistance
I'm allowed cash assistance for my kid if make less than $19,000/year. My cumulative assets--including the cost of a car if I have one, or savings, or investments, any property, or any child support I'm getting--cannot be over $1,000. I can get cash assistance for a total of 60 months in my life. So until the baby is 5. After that it's done. Oh, and did I mention I have to work? I get 12 months where I'm exempt from the work requirement for being pregnant and having the kid. After that I need to work--but if I go over that $19,000/year income limit, everything gets dropped! Because when you're a single mom making more than $19,000 you are SMOOTH SAILING. Oh yeah, and the maximum monthly benefits are $367.

----------------------

Now, I'm gonna go ahead and apply. This takes getting together paychecks, proof of assets, property, citizenship, birth certificate of the kid, proof of residency (gosh, I hope I'm not homeless!), SS card, and I need to take it to the local assistance office. Where I should really hand-deliver it, because more often then not when you mail these things they "don't receive it" and you'll need to gather all those documents again (by the way, I hope you have all those documents, being poor, living hand-to-mouth, and off of friend's couches is no reason to not have a filing cabinet of your papers with you). If you want to call their help line, you will often get the message "Too many people are calling" and the system will automatically hang up on you. Then once they DO get your packet of information you get to wait at least a month for approval!

--------------------

OK! Well fuck all that, I'm going to have my baby. All I have to do is:
- Raise a child for 18 years
- Have less than $1,000 in total assets
- Make less than $15,000/year

And I will get:

- A chance to be on a waitlist of 53,000 people for Section 8 housing if I go around Philadelphia submitting applications to all the sites
- Healthcare as long as I'm pregnant (what a bonus!)
- $367/month to spend only on food products
- $367/month in cash assistance until the kid is 5

Hell yeah. All those bonuses and all I have to do is live in crippling poverty and have no plan for a financial future. Totally awesome deal. Totally an incentive to have a baby. Sign me up!
posted by Anonymous at 9:03 PM on May 5, 2012


We've had at least three or four posts on this execrable woman. At this point, I think we're just giving her a platform to make stupid points. She should be ignored.
posted by koeselitz at 9:05 PM on May 5, 2012 [6 favorites]


Can we at least have them autoclaved?
posted by hermitosis at 9:13 PM on May 5, 2012


Sterilize poor female drug users? OK - then for consistency, let's sterilize rich male drug users too. Maybe we can start looking for them at the Goldman Sachs trading desk.
posted by problemspace at 9:17 PM on May 5, 2012 [3 favorites]


Hell yeah. All those bonuses and all I have to do is live in crippling poverty and have no plan for a financial future. Totally awesome deal. Totally an incentive to have a baby. Sign me up!

You mock it but I actually know several women who have uttered the words "I am going to get pregnant again, I need to get medicaid/foodstamps/tanf."

That they are drug addicts could be related. But yes, it does happen quite often, you just kind of have to run in the extremely poor circles to see things like that. The welfare does help people who are in legitimate need, but mostly, from what I've seen, it just goes to drug addicts and their children.

I still don't believe they should be sterilized. Just because someone might think it's a good idea if they don't have children, doesn't mean there should be a law to force such a thing.

A lot of this could be solved by free medical/mental health care and free drug rehabilitation.
posted by Malice at 9:18 PM on May 5, 2012


On another note, aren't a lot of our great leaders people who had been born in adversity?
posted by Malice at 9:19 PM on May 5, 2012


I love me some anecdotal data. Especially when I don't believe a word of it.
posted by Brocktoon at 9:24 PM on May 5, 2012 [3 favorites]


I lived on $6500 last year, is that poor enough to run in "poor circles"?

But yes, it does happen quite often, you just kind of have to run in the extremely poor circles to see things like that.

Do you have any data for this that isn't your anecdotal "I know this friend-of-a-friend" claims? Because when, say, Florida instituted a drug-testing program for all welfare recipients they found it saved no money and caught no drug addicts abusing the system to feed their drug habit.

I am not saying us poors are all sunshine and light and martyrs. But this "Well everyone knows the druggies just get pregnant for money for drugs" bullshit that gets propagated everywhere has no documented evidence, whatsoever, besides anecdata and how "truthy" it feels to people. So c'mon, man. Please, pony up all those stats of the crack moms having baby after baby for $367/month.
posted by Anonymous at 9:26 PM on May 5, 2012


i grew up in a really shitty trailer park, on welfare, surrounded by people on welfare. i mostly only saw families that worked as hard as they could to barely scrape by. i wasn't aware of anyone on drugs - in fact, the first person i met who i knew did drugs was a friend of mine who lived in the rich historical section of town when i was a teenager.

so maybe our anecdotal data can just cancel each other out and we can discuss some facts instead.
posted by nadawi at 9:31 PM on May 5, 2012 [5 favorites]


Time to play devil's advocate:

* Based on their survey forms, only about 1/4 of their "clients" have been African-American. Half have been white.

* According to this interview she also attempted to address fetal alcohol syndrome (granted, not in a way I'm comfortable with). Perhaps she focuses on crack because the first of four babies she adopted tested positive for it?

* I am having trouble tying Harris to Chris Brand (the eugenics wacko). Brand does mention the program on his blog as a potential super-awesome-eugenics thing, but nowhere does he mention he's done anything for them, and Harris refutes that they've met.

I have problems with her rhetoric and her approach, but cries of racism and other ad hominem attacks aren't productive.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:32 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


Malice: TANF goes for 5 years in a LIFETIME you must work or search for work or be in a training program for 30 hours a week. Having another baby does nothing for you besides giving you another mouth to feed and another child in diapers. You can get SNAP payments by having no assets and by earning less than $1100 a month no babies required. Not sure how much value Medicaid is for an addict if she is using and pregnant and goes to see a doctor she will usually be jailed for felony child endangerment losing her TANF payments. If she has a felony conviction in her past she cannot qualify in most states. The days of welfare queens are long gone we do not pay people to have babies certainly not like Canada does. Welfare fraud is illegal and a failure of the system to properly monitor and administer the benefits such as they are.
posted by pdxpogo at 9:38 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


I have problems with her rhetoric and her approach, but cries of racism and other ad hominem attacks aren't productive.

Look... she makes stuff up, we make stuff up. It's the Chicago way.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:46 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


birdherder wrote:
I am also A-OK with using my tax dollars for addiction treatment programs off the drugs so there's fewer "crack babies" as well.
Crack babies are a myth.
posted by Critical_Beatdown at 9:54 PM on May 5, 2012 [2 favorites]


Can we sterilize people who make dubstep?
posted by deathpanels at 10:02 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


Sterilize poor female drug users? OK - then for consistency, let's sterilize rich male drug users too. Maybe we can start looking for them at the Goldman Sachs trading desk.

You mean the ones who haven't done it already?

Approximately 500,000 vasectomies are performed annually in the United States. About one out of every six men over the age of 35 has had a vasectomy. Higher vasectomy rates are associated with higher levels of education and income.

posted by Brian B. at 10:03 PM on May 5, 2012


A possible solution to this troubling problem: sterilize eugenics advocates...
posted by el io at 10:05 PM on May 5, 2012


RobotVoodooPower, African-Americans make up only about 12% of the US population. So if a full quarter of services are going to blacks? That seems off. While it's a little older, the data here indicates that rates of illicit drug use are not twice as high in blacks as in whites, for example, for both pregnant women and across the board. That would indicate, I'm pretty sure, that either they're advertising in ways that disproportionately reach blacks (problematic) or that blacks are less likely to have other information about how to obtain birth control (problematic) or that blacks are for some reason considerably more motivated by the cash incentive (far-fetched).

Schroedinger: I am NOT personally buying into the welfare queen trope. I am saying that I, personally, was tempted. Most of those programs don't reward you for having a billion kids, of course not. Many of them are also completely unavailable if you don't have at least one. There are very likely to be at least some young women who are in a position where they don't yet have children and should be delaying having children entirely for whom the prospect of eligibility for housing assistance, TANF even temporarily, and Medicaid is not unattractive, which I say because I have about as much interest in being pregnant as in cutting my hands off and still considered it, personally, when I was living on $400/mo. It's not a huge benefit, but neither is three hundred bucks. I don't think there's too much stuff for women with children, out there; I think there's not enough support for women who don't have them who are poor anyway.
posted by gracedissolved at 10:10 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


Obviously this person is a typical evil progressive, etc. But in her defense regarding the racist implications, I don't think it's too common to understand racial cocaine preferences. I didn't know that whites don't use "crack cocaine."
posted by michaelh at 10:19 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


@schroedinger: Then dont have the baby. But childless youre still in the same boat.

You're talking poverty and Project Prevention is talking the kids who are born into poverty by way of drug-addicted mothers.

Which by the way raises the question, if an addict is incapable of consenting to sterilization, how in the world is she capable of rearing a child?
posted by kgasmart at 10:27 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


Because addicts love their children just as much as anyone else, and some of them work their fucking asses off? In fact, as I've mentioned countless times, you probably know several addicts, but since we don't put "I am a junkie" brands on their foreheads, you have absolutely no clue. Junkie charicatutes are the product of years of War on Drugs propaganda and Hollywood script writers. Please update your perspective accordingly.
posted by Brocktoon at 10:36 PM on May 5, 2012 [3 favorites]


I don't think it's too common to understand racial cocaine preferences. I didn't know that whites don't use "crack cocaine."

Sorry, but this is a very commonly known issue. She's clearly racist; though it is possible to do a good, neutral or bad thing for bad reasons. Hence, I don't care if she's racist or not and find that conversation to be dull. Still, don't kid yourself, she's very, very racist.

yet these women are literally having litters of children,” Barbara Harris says.

Are they? Do women with drug addictions have more children that other women of similar socio-economic backgrounds? More importantly; are they really have children that are worse off than mothers who drank during pregnancy? I think FAS could explain a lot more social instability than the over-hyped "crack baby" crisis.

In some ways, these people might be using drug users as a way to hint at what they really want, which is sterilization of the poor. What's funny is that all these Randian Supermen have to do is stop their assault on contraception and abortion rights, and there would be less children living off public coffers.
posted by spaltavian at 10:39 PM on May 5, 2012


bookman117: "Should addicts be sterilized?"

Gosh, what a good question. Also, should we put all the gay people in camps?

This post is offensive.
posted by koeselitz at 10:42 PM on May 5, 2012


What's funny is that all these Randian Supermen have to do is stop their assault on contraception and abortion rights, and there would be less children living off public coffers.


Devout Catholics aren't known for their Randian tendencies.
posted by Brian B. at 10:43 PM on May 5, 2012


kgasmart: "Which by the way raises the question, if an addict is incapable of consenting to sterilization, how in the world is she capable of rearing a child?"

Yes, addicted people who are in seriously bad places can fix their lives enough that they become capable of being awesome parents. If you think otherwise, I question whether you've ever thought seriously abought what parenting means.
posted by koeselitz at 10:47 PM on May 5, 2012 [1 favorite]


Catholics aren't the only ones doing that.
posted by spaltavian at 10:47 PM on May 5, 2012


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