Cracked Logic by Salim Muwakkil
"If you are addicted to drugs get birth control--get $200 cash," read the billboards that have materialized in two of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods.
That pitch summarizes the program of an organization called CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity) that offers cash to drug addicts for sterilization or long-term contraception. For addicts chronically short on cash, $200 is an alluring offer.
A privately funded program founded in Anaheim, Calif., in 1997, CRACK enlists market forces in a self-professed attempt to halt an epidemic of drug-addicted newborns. These infants face enormous odds overcoming prenatal damage. Research also has shown that the children of alcoholics and drug addicts are at much higher risk for abuse and neglect than other children.
CRACK was started by Barbara Harris, a housewife and PTA member. After adopting four children from the same cocaine-addicted mother, Harris tried to get legislation passed in California mandating contraception for addicts. After that effort failed, Harris came up with the idea of offering money to addicts for tubal ligations or vasectomies, or for long-term contraception, such as intrauterine devices, Norplant inserts or injectable contraceptives like Depo Provera. With some missionary zeal and canny marketing (the acronym CRACK is provocative and, some say, racist), she has attracted considerable notice and many donors. To get the money, addicts have to submit an arrest report and a doctor's letter detailing the form of birth control they are using.
According to the CRACK Web site (<http://www.cracksterilization.com>), 61 women in four states have been paid since the program's inception. Before being sterilized, these women had been pregnant a combined total of 446 times. Of those pregnancies, 277 were brought to term, 23 babies were stillborn, 22 died from complications at birth and 185 are in foster care. Twenty-six of the women are Caucasian, 24 are African-American and 11 are Hispanic. While the bulk of the cases are in California, the group also has paid clients in Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Hampshire. But the July 26 opening of CRACK's first national office in Chicago granted the group its greatest notoriety to date. Almost 50 women responded to the Chicago ads during the first week.
The most common objection to the CRACK program is that it targets minority communities for what is essentially coercive sterilization. "Dangling $200 in front of addicted women seriously calls into question whether participation is voluntary," says Steve Trombley, president of Chicago Planned Parenthood. "Where is the informed consent?"
This charge is based on the notion that addicts are so addled they can't make a rational decision about whether to participate in the program, much less choose between sterilization and long-term contraception. Critics also have noted that the acronym CRACK alludes to a drug publicly associated with minorities, and thus signals Harris' racist intent, hinting at limiting the growth of those dreaded minorities. For her part, Harris insists the name was chosen simply for its dramatic impact.
Such criticisms fuel fears that eugenics is making a comeback. The principles of eugenics, that society should optimize the survival of "positive" genetic traits and impair the reproduction of "negative" traits, have a long history in this country. At the beginning of the 20th century, many states enacted compulsory sterilization laws, primarily for mentally ill women. In a famous 1927 Supreme Court ruling that justified the forced sterilization of 19-year-old Carrie Buck, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that "three generations of imbeciles is enough."
In 1932, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger outlined a so-called "Plan for Peace," which called for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation and concentration camps for all "dysgenic stocks." Sanger's "Negro Project" was one of the clearest examples of eugenicist thought of the era. "The mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously," she wrote, "with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit."
Sanger's views were based in part on the theories of 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus, who proposed that population naturally grows faster than the means of subsistence. Thus, hunger, poverty and deprivation were evidence of a population crisis requiring some demographic "pruning." The theory of Social Darwinism--which postulated that society benefits when the least fit perish--added a note of authenticity to Malthusians' claims. Intellectual elites and political radicals--particularly socialists--eagerly appropriated these ideas as a way to create a world with minimal deprivation.
In 1907, Indiana became the first state to enact a eugenics sterilization law. By 1937, 32 states had passed similar laws, typically aimed at epileptics, the mentally impaired, alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals and the "dependent poor." Many of these women were sterilized either without their consent or with consent obtained under duress.
The Nazis' use of eugenics to justify the genocide of Jews and other minorities discredited the concept for many years. But eugenics still permeates American culture. Twenty-two states have sterilization statutes on the books and base those laws on eugenic logic. In fact, according to Linda Gordon's 1990 book, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, more women have been sterilized since the '70s than in all previous years combined. However, in 1979 stringent federal sterilization regulations--requiring informed consent and explanation of alternative contraceptive measures, among other things--were enacted.
Although Harris denies it, eugenics underlie the CRACK program. And lest there be any doubt of eugenics' current popularity, consider a study released just days after CRACK's Chicago debut, which credits the legalization of abortion in the '70s for the puzzling decline in crime rates in the '90s. The paper's authors, Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and John Donohue II, a Stanford University Law School professor, believe that abortion performed a sort of pre-emptive strike on potential criminals.
By examining abortion rates since the advent of legalized abortion and the drop in crime 20 years later, the study concludes that abortion accounts for about half of the decline in murders, other violent crimes and property crimes since 1991. "In some senses, this is a conjecture," Levitt told the Washington Post. "This hypothesis can never be proven to the degree of certainty that a scientist might demand."
Still, the two researchers were startled by the apparent link between abortion and crime rates. For example, in the five states that made abortion legal three years before Roe v. Wade, crime rates fell earlier than they did elsewhere. The two authors also found that states with especially high rates of abortion in the first years after Roe have seen disproportionately large decreases in crime.
The two authors contend they are not pushing an agenda. But their conclusions must hearten eugenicists everywhere, who have long argued that selective population pruning can have salutary social affects. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based organization that researches reproductive issues, women who are under 25, never-married, poor and minority are more likely to have abortions than any other group. Although white women make up 60 percent of all abortion cases, African-American and Hispanic women have much higher rates of abortion. Black women are three times as likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are twice as likely.
But Levitt and Donohue de-emphasize the issue of race. "I don't think it is a racial story," Donohue told the Chicago Tribune. "I think it's much more about people who are born under very unfortunate circumstances who will suffer a lot more, and I think neglect, abuse and attendant anger that occurs because of that can really be a stimulus to crime."
Ironically, many of those who object to the eugenic taint of Harris' program are heartened by the study's findings. "It shows the necessity for allowing women the ability to choose the timing of their pregnancies," said one Planned Parenthood spokesman.
That may be true, but it also legitimizes the notion that children born to certain populations are potential social liabilities. It is that underlying logic that poses such a danger to vulnerable populations. Such conflicting impulses may account for the reason why Harris' program has failed to provoke much real opposition. It's also difficult for those on the left to criticize CRACK when prominent African-American columnists like the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page and Mary Mitchell of the rival Chicago Sun-Times have written favorably of the program.
Another troubling aspect of Harris' cash-for-sterilization program is the ascendancy of market forces on issues of reproductive control. In general, legislative regulations always have limited the intrusion of market forces into reproductive policy. That's why the law prohibits baby selling, and regulates surrogacy contracts and the harvesting of fetal organs. These various controls are designed to protect vulnerable people from exploitation, and there is perhaps no American as vulnerable as a drug-addicted, African-American female.
Barbara Harris is no racist. She is married to an African-American man, with whom she has two children. Her four adopted children also are black. However, her methods for addressing a very real problem have racist implications. The very notion that certain demographic groups would be better off not reproducing gives credence to eugenic arguments.
What's more, programs designed to bribe undesirables into sterilization are an international phenomenon condemned by human rights groups. The Czech Republic, for example, is investigating past practices that targeted Romany (Gypsy) women for sterilization by offering rewards or threatening to cut off welfare benefits. Similar charges have been launched against Canada's two westernmost provinces, Alberta and British Columbia, where Native American women were targeted for sterilization for many years--and where bribery was the preferred bait.
Although eugenics violates the idea of the sanctity of the individual and the "self-evident" truths of human equality, it always has been attractive to utopians of all kinds. The idea of a scientific fix for humanity's problems is at the very heart of Marxist ideology, for instance. Progressives should keep that in mind when confronting procreative engineering of any kind.
Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor for In These Times.