From my understanding this charity helps with long term birth control as well as sterilizing those addicts who know they aren't going to able to care for or keep a child (and who've already had children if they are women).
I understand the issue of coercion, and from what I've read it doesn't look like this charity is just giving money away here left right and centre - it is to the tier 1 top offenders who've already had children and aren't acting responsibly.
Dear Sir,
I’m writing to make your readers aware of a worrying ‘import’ from America.
Barbara Harris who calls herself ‘BlessedBarbara’ on the Internet site ‘twitter’ is the right wing, Christian founder of ‘Project Prevention’, a charity from N. Carolina, USA that aims to bring about the sterilisation of substance abusers. Now she wants to set up shop in the UK too. The ‘charity’ achieves its divisive aim by paying these desperate individuals up to £200 to undergo the procedure.
The stated aim of Project Prevention is to prevent the birth of drug exposed children. The idea appears to be that no life at all is preferable to life gestated by an addict.
However, the ‘questions and answers’ section of Project Prevention’s website makes it clear that the prevention of social delinquency and violent crime are just as high on the charity’s agenda. It seems that discrimination based upon parental behaviour and denying the right to life of the socially disadvantaged is just as important to Harris.
Project Prevention runs the ‘CRACK’ project that targets black neighbourhoods in the US. The CRACK project was heavily influenced by Chris Brand, the self confessed ‘scientific racist’ and eugenicist who famously asserted that black people are of limited IQ and that their reproductive choices should be considered seperately from white citizens. Brand was an advisor on the project and has praised it as a major contributor to the eugenic cause.
It’s a voluntary scheme, began when Barbara Harris failed to get a bill passed in California making sterilisation compulsory and enforceable.
We have been here before.
“Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution.”
Such was the definition used at the second International Eugenics Conference in 1921. Eugenics, the conscious application of selective breeding techniques to ‘improve’ the gene pool was popular at the time. It’s the ideology that influenced many of Hitler’s Nazi Party policies of extermination.
Quite apart from the huge philosophical issues raised concerning the value of babies born to addicted parents there are some more basic errors too. After all traits associated with addiction and crime (they’re not necessarily the same, by the way) are as much social as they are genetic. In fact the notion of genetic links to crime is seriously short on evidence in the first place.
Of course it could be argued that these addicts have a choice. However it would be a lame argument. The target group for this eugenic revival is the substance-dependent population. If the American experience is anything to go by it will be addicts from predominantly black neighbourhoods who are the main focus. By definition addicts in withdrawal are likely to go to almost any lengths to obtain their substance of choice.
In these circumstances the offer of £200 becomes less of a free choice and more of a coersive and cynical strategy to gain co-operation from desperate people. I wonder how much Barbara Harris would be prepared to pay had she been able to persuade lawmakers to enforce her odious devaluation of children and their socially outcast parents.
Even if we ignore the racist and particularly uncaring aspect of this scheme the narrow focus upon sterilisation doesn’t tackle the wider issues. There is a drug problem in UK and many children are affected by it but bribing desperate people to be sterilised doesn’t solve anything in the long term. There again, when the Project’s slogans include:
“don’t let pregnancy get in the way of your drug habit”
It’s clear that tackling the drugs problem isn’t really their point.
Reproductive health services already exist in UK with a code of ethics that matches British views on human rights. Better to fund those services than bribe desperate people to give up on their chances of a future family.
Even America, not generally renowned for it’s record on human rights has declined to ratify the proposal in law. I wonder if the UK will do as well as the states in rejecting this vile, sectarian attempt to return to the dehumanising ideologies of the past.
I urge readers to express your distaste for this scheme by writing to your MP, and by doing what you can to raise awareness of the plan.
Stuart Sorensen
Stuart.sorensen@googlemail.com
Update 31st May 2010:
Project Prevention has amended its plans for UK. They will no longer be offering sterilisation to addicts within these shores:
http://stuartsorensen.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/propject-prevention-amends-its-plans-for-uk/Who says speaking out doesn’t work?
Topic: Charity offers UK drug addicts £200 to be sterilised