Source: Real Change (WA)
Pubdate: 01 May 2000
Website: http://www.realchangenews.org/
Address: 2129 Second Avenue, Seattle WA 98121
Contact:  2002 Real Change
Fax: (206)374-2455
Author: Adam Holdorf

THE $200 FIX

Positive Prevention Puts A Price On Poor Peoples' Reproductive Freedom

Last week, Real Change reported on the start-up efforts of a local group 
called Positive Prevention that offers drug addicts $200 to get long-term 
birth control. Perhaps our reporting was a little too "objective." One 
reader assumed we were joking. We also got a thank-you letter from a member 
of the group, in appreciation of the "positive" press.

Her thank-you was well-earned. It's hard to report fairly on a group that 
wants to fix mothers likely to bear unhealthy babies in the name of 
protecting children. It's an inhumane tactic that purchases the 
reproductive rights of women with the one thing no real addict can refuse: 
cash.

A Positive Prevention volunteer asked me not to use the word 
"sterilization" in reporting on the group's goals. She emphasized that the 
group lets women choose temporary options like IUDs, Norplant, or hormonal 
injections. But it will also pay women to get permanent tubal ligations.

If that's not sterilization, call it eugenics. That's the effect of the 
cash-for-contraceptives tactic, employed in Chicago and the Bay Area by a 
group called CRACK ("Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity"). It's an echo 
of the forced sterilization movement that gained a foothold in this country 
nearly 100 years ago.

Around the country, drug addicts are perhaps the most despised group of 
social deviants around. Legislators looking for easy votes raise the 
specter of welfare cheats driving nice cars, or spending their 
taxpayer-provided income on drugs, or getting pregnant, then getting more 
welfare money when a new baby comes along.

Some estimate that a half-million babies are born having been exposed to 
drugs in the womb. While prenatal damage to babies is horrible, many babies 
show no signs of long-term damage. But even if they were all healthy, their 
mothers could be in jail: victims of harsh mandatory minimum sentences for 
nonviolent drug offenses. Whether stunted by drugs or hunted by 
politicians, these mothers are entrapped. As the New Republic wrote last 
year, "the only figure this society views with more contempt than a crack 
whore is a pregnant crack whore."

The cash-for-contraceptives approach makes a kind of sardonic sense. It may 
be the only immediate attention poor female addicts can find. About 500 
people are on the Seattle-King County Public Health Department's waiting 
list for subsidized methadone treatment, prolonging the dire wait for an 
alternative to heroin. For these women, the prospect of getting $200 for 
birth control from some do-gooder must sound like a real business opportunity.

The costs, of course, are the rights of the mothers. And here's a point 
around which even conservatives can rally: Positive Prevention puts a price 
on reproductive freedom. The American Civil Liberties Union has documented 
the government's decade-long attempts to get birth control implants 
mandated by law on female drug addicts. In some states, legislatures have 
tried to enshrine Positive Prevention's tactics in law by giving drug 
offenders a choice between Norplant and prison, or offering 
cash-for-contraceptives to women on welfare.

Reproductive freedom is a constitutional right, and "incentive plans, while 
not couched as requirements, are nonetheless coercive," the ACLU writes. 
"The offer of money to feed, clothe, and house their families - even if it 
is in exchange for giving up their constitutional rights - may be difficult 
to refuse." Some peoples' rights come cheaper than others. The more 
disposable your future, the more disposable your genes.

Even the inventor of Norplant, Dr. Sheldon Segal, was horrified at the 
coercive possibilities of his creation. "My colleagues and I worked on this 
innovation for decades because we respect human dignity and believe that 
women should be able to have the number of children they want, when they 
want to have them," he told the ACLU. "Not just educated and well-to-do 
women, but all women."

As long as the cash-for-contraceptives movement relies on myths, here's a 
counter-image for its supporters to chew on: a Positive Prevention or CRACK 
graduate, broke again, having unprotected sex in exchange for her next fix, 
or simply in return for a night out of the cold. Desperately poor women 
sometimes grasp motherhood as the last vocation available to them, besides 
prostitution. Perhaps to choose sterility is to achieve a rueful freedom 
from their bodies. And for some, abandoned by everything else, the price is 
right.