Pubdate: July 29, 1999 Source: Chicago Tribune (IL) Copyright: 1999 Chicago Tribune Company Contact: http://www.chicagotribune.com/ Forum: http://www.chicagotribune.com/interact/boards/ Author: Bruce A. Boyer WHO IS FIT TO PARENT? This week, with great fanfare, the California-based Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity brought to Chicago its innovative approach to birth control: paying drug users $200 if they agree to sterilization or long-term contraception. CRACK's pilot program boasts an impressive record when viewed solely in terms of the statistical impact its clients have had on the child-welfare system. Fifty-seven CRACK participants had given birth to 250 children. Roughly two-thirds of them are in foster care and many others suffer from prenatal drug exposure complications. CRACK's tactics clearly have appeal to a broad spectrum of child-welfare and health professionals who contend daily with the scourge of substance abuse. Yet something about the non-profit program remains deeply unsettling. Some may be surprised to learn that the world's history with eugenic sterilization is not confined to Nazi Germany and Communist China. Social reformers in the United States advocated sterilization as a solution to mental retardation during the early 1900s. In 1927, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rejected the pleas of a feeble-minded woman named Carrie Buck and allowed her forced sterilization to go forward with the admonition that "three generations of imbeciles is enough." Echoes of Holmes' words reverberate in the arguments of CRACK founder Barbara Harris, who contends that the best solution to curtailing the number of drug-addicted babies is to stop drug-addicted parents from having children in the first place. Much of the criticism leveled at CRACK can reasonably be addressed by pointing to the best interests of the children and the money saved by reducing the number of children born to substance-addicted parents who can't care for them. While this type of cost-benefit analysis does much to justify Harris' entrepreneurial spirit, it does not address a more fundamental issue about using permanent or long-term contraception as a market-based tool for social control. In the law of reproductive rights and parent-child relations, public policy-based limits on market forces are the norm rather than the exception. For this reason, the law generally prohibits baby selling, regulates surrogacy contracts and requires the intervention of a social agency before a parent can voluntarily surrender a child for adoption. All of these controls help to guard against the exploitation of largely powerless constituencies. Despite this fact, CRACK continues to operate in a regulatory vacuum. Moreover, while CRACK professes to be colorblind toward its clientele, its billboards in California, Minnesota, Florida, and now Chicago, have been raised almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods. This fact addresses the same concerns raised about two recent trends in the law that affect poor black women disproportionately: the criminalization of pre-natal substance abuse and the forced sterilization of mothers convicted of drug use as a condition of probation. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has argued that prosecutors and judges see these kinds of reproductive penalties as appropriate, in large part because society does not view these women as suitable mothers in the first place. While Roberts' view is subject to debate, the complete absence of any regulation or control of CRACK's work, "in an area of law where such control is the norm," makes it difficult to respond to the charge that its cash-for-fertility exchange is just another attempt to control the birth of black children. In the 72 years since Justice Holmes' infamous opinion on Carrie Buck's case, the social science theories that once provided the foundation for eugenic sterilization laws have all been repudiated. If nothing else, this unfortunate chapter of history suggests compelling reason to be cautious about CRACK's tactics. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek Rea