Benevolent Bribery--Or Racism?

By Margot Hornblower/Los Angeles

At the dining-room table, Isiah, an eight-year-old with a toothy grin, carefully creases paper airplanes, enlisting his mother to staple them together. "Nobody makes them as well as you," she says. Can this be the same foster baby that Barbara Harris carried home from the hospital--a stiff-limbed infant who couldn't sleep more than 15 minutes at a stretch, who would wake screaming and vomiting? "He was a bundle of nerves," recalls Harris, who adopted Isiah and three of his siblings, all born with crack cocaine in their systems. "He had the shakes. All you could do was have patience."

Yet Harris is anything but patient with the drug-addicted women who each year give birth to some 500,000 drug-exposed children in the U.S., many of them brain-damaged and HIV-infected. As Isiah's birth mother "popped out babies every year," Harris says, "I got angrier and angrier." Harris adopted the last four of the woman's eight children. But she also "called the D.A. and the police to see if I could make a citizen's arrest of the mother for endangering her kids. I wrote the politicians, but they don't care. The social workers were helpless. Finally I realized that if I wanted these women to take birth control, I'd have to do it on my own."

So Harris, 47, a homemaker in Stanton, Calif., came up with a market-based proposition: she would pay drug addicts $200 to get sterilized or take long-term birth control. Since November 1997, Harris' nonprofit organization, Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity, has paid 61 women to follow her program: 44 had their tubes tied; the remainder took time-release birth-control drugs. Before they signed up, Harris says, the women acknowledged having experienced a total of 446 pregnancies, of which 169 were aborted. Twenty-three of their children were stillborn, 22 died later, and 185 were placed in foster care.

A former waitress with a cheerful, assertive manner, Harris runs CRACK from a two-room office above a dental clinic, working mornings while her children are in school. Her board of directors includes a law professor, a retired police officer, three social workers and a foster mother who has taken in seven drug-addicted babies. CRACK has mounted a toll-free hot line, a website cracksterilization.com and billboards in four states. It opened a chapter in Chicago last month and has garnered attention from the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters. Radio shrink Dr. Laura Schlessinger contributed $5,000.

In the past three weeks Harris has sent out forms to about 200 addicts, including 10 men who can qualify with vasectomies. From her home computer she answers scores of supportive e-mails--and occasional hate messages--that pour into her mailbox: Luvbabies@aol.com

To critics, Harris' activities amount to eugenics: bribing befuddled women to give up their reproductive rights. "Two hundred dollars could lead these women to make a decision they would later regret," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "It is unethical because they cannot give their informed consent." American Civil Liberties Union lawyers and a host of university bioethics scholars concur, claiming the addicts are insufficiently protected--even by the 30-day consent period and counseling required by law before federal funds can be spent on sterilization.

Several clients referred by Harris are willing to defend the program publicly. Sharon Adams, 39, says she prostituted herself for 12 years to pay for crack and bore 14 children--eight of them born addicted. Now drug free and working as a pizza-delivery driver, she says, "This program isn't forcing anybody to do anything." Sherry Golding, 29, a former methamphetamine addict who struggled to regain custody of her three children, says the $200 she got to have her tubes tied was "a lifesaver. It helped me get my life together."

While some detractors accuse Harris, who is white, of racism, she shrugs it off. Her husband, a surgical technician, is African American. Her three grown biological sons are biracial. The four children they adopted are black. The women who have accepted her offer so far constitute a mixed group: 26 Caucasians, 24 African Americans and 11 Hispanics. From her narrow kitchen, where the fax machine is wedged between the microwave and the electric grill pan, Harris heaps scorn on the naysayers as she whips up cheese sandwiches for lunch. "The people who yell the loudest aren't the ones raising these kids," she scoffs. "Unless you're willing to take these babies into your home for 18 years, your opinion means nothing to me."