Posted on 01/29/2003 6:11:00 PM PST by ex-Texan
OREGON LIBERALS UPSET BY PROGRAM TO KEEP YOUNG WOMEN ADDICTS FROM GETTING PREGNANT
COVER STORY:The Fix
How do you keep an addict from getting pregnant? Pay her.
by AMY ROE
Last month, Heather Keithley, 21, went to Planned Parenthood on Northeast Fremont Street. Inside the clinic she lay down on an exam table, her straight, reddish-brown hair splayed out behind her. She tried not to flinch as a small, T-shaped stick was inserted into her vagina and, finally, her uterus.
She was getting an IUD.
And, because Keithley is a recovering speed freak, she'll also get $200 from a California nonprofit.
Keithley had been doing crank since she was 14. At 16, she moved from Clearlake, Calif., to Portland to live with her dad and was introduced to the drug's purer cousin, crystal meth. They became best friends.
Keithley dropped out of Cleveland High School and spent days studying her pipe. Scoring in her outer Southeast neighborhood was easy. Benders with friends seemed infinite; the drug once kept Keithley up for nearly two weeks, playing cards or dice or just driving around. They tweaked for hours in Walgreen's. There was no hunger, no need of anything--not even sleep.
Besides the body high--like cocaine's rush, without its numbness--Keithley craved the transformation meth gave her: "It changes the whole person that you are. It makes you feel like you're superior and nobody can touch you and you have power."
Like helium in a balloon, the fuel would eventually dissipate, leaving Keithley unbearably low. "Oh, my God, it's horrible," she says of coming off the drug. "You're sick, no energy at all, you get really bitchy. So you want to get back up."
Keithley says she is clean now, and has been for eight months. The $200 she'll get for putting a birth-control device in her uterus will buy a new outfit, not a fix.
Addict, recovering addict, dirty, clean...whatever. The distinction hardly matters to CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity), the group that gave her the money. "As long as they stay on birth control," says founder Barbara Harris, "that's all we care about."
Forty-eight Oregon women have taken CRACK up on its offer since 1999, 30 of whom were sterilized. Harris expects that number to grow, but it won't come without a fight.
Barbara Harris
"We'd be concerned about any program that had any hint of coercion involved," says David Fidanque of the ACLU of Oregon. "It's one thing to make birth control available; it's another to give people cash to use it."
Barbara Harris, who lives in Orange County, Calif., is as blunt as her group's acronym. It's not hard to imagine her as a waitress at the International House of Pancakes--the job she held for 20 years before she and her husband, a surgical technician, became foster parents. They took in the children of a Los Angeles cocaine addict, one after another, until they'd adopted four.
"[CRACK] came out of the frustration of getting a phone call every year," she says.
She tried to get California legislation passed to make it mandatory for women who give birth to drug-exposed babies to use long-term birth control, but the bill failed. That's when Harris came up with the idea of offering cash incentives.
She formed a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Laura Schlessinger donated $10,000 to the program and touted it on her radio talk show, Dr. Laura. The group launched a national mass-mailing campaign to probation departments and drug-treatment centers. She paid her first client in November 1997.
"Once the word got out about what we were doing, we got calls from all over the U.S.," Harris says. "It snowballed."
The organization--which is also known as Project Prevention--has since received more than $2 million in donations, most of it from wealthy conservatives. Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife contributed $75,000 through his Allegheny Foundation. Jim Woodhill, a Houston venture capitalist and self-proclaimed member of the "Republican Rebel Alliance," contributed $125,000.
Prospective clients call a toll-free number, leaving their name and address after a recorded message. CRACK mails them forms to take to their parole officer, drug-treatment provider or caseworker, who documents the history of substance abuse. The program is open to users of any drug, including alcohol, but the applicant must provide the name and number of a person who can vouch for the abuse as well as documents, such as court papers, to prove it. (According to CRACK, cocaine is the drug most often used by applicants, followed by meth and heroin--but most say they use alcohol as well.)
Applicants take the forms to a clinic, where a health-care provider signs and dates them, verifying that they have received an intrauterine device, Depo-Provera or a tubal ligation. (Birth-control pills are excluded because, as Harris explains, "We don't trust them to take a pill every day.")
Prospective clients mail these forms, along with a questionnaire about their race, sexual history and drug use, back to CRACK, where a worker calls the numbers given to authenticate their claims. Clients usually receive a check in about a week.
Harris is aware junkies sometimes use the money to feed their habit. At least with CRACK, she reasons, they won't get knocked up while they're at it. They won't use abortion as birth control. They won't give birth to sickly babies, babies they can't take care of, babies who often end up shunted from one foster home to another, burdening the system, shaming the mothers from whom they were taken.
Many who work in social-service agencies agree with Harris. At any given time, Oregon's foster-care system houses between 6,000 and 7,000 children. Parental substance abuse, during pregnancy and afterward, is the No. 1 reason they're there, says Jay Wurscher, alcohol and drug services coordinator for the state office of Mental Health and Addiction. Given these statistics, "There's no way [CRACK] can go wrong," Wurscher says. "If you keep somebody on birth control for two to three years--18 to 21--the amount of money you've saved is probably incalculable."
David Fidanque
Catherine Earp, Multnomah County nurse health manager for Early Head Start, has seen the effects of addiction. "After you work at Child Protective Services and you have a couple women hand over their babies saying they want their drug instead, it's pretty powerful," Earp says. "I don't care if it's a Band-Aid. If people are not bringing drug-exposed babies into the world, more power to them. That might be radical, but these kids have long-term problems."
Yet even those who generally support CRACK's concept draw the line at rewarding sterilization. "Permanent sterilization is a pretty grim thing to be looking at when a person does recover and achieve sobriety," says Wurscher.
CRACK ought to distinguish between young clients and more hardened drug abusers, says Daniel Pitasky, associate director of New Avenues for Youth. "If they're targeting adults that have long-term addictions, that's one thing, but when you're talking about 15- or 17-year-old youth, somebody could age out of those behaviors."
Then there are those who oppose CRACK altogether. Such critics run the gamut--from public-health officials who express vague discomfort with the idea to advocates for the poor and drug-addicted, who say CRACK's cash-for-birth-control scheme is tantamount to a campaign against minorities and the poor.
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Kigvamasud Vashti says the program's racism is blatant. "The program's not called DRUG, it's called CRACK. In America, there's a very specific image when you say crack: poor, urban and black."
Oregon statistics, however, don't support her claims. Of the CRACK clients in this state, 40 are white, five black and one Hispanic. The remaining two listed their race as "other."
Kigvamasud Vashti says the discrimination goes beyond race. She says it's impossible to imagine anyone but the poor being subjected to such a program. "This is not Robert Downey Jr.'s kids, or Whitney Houston, or Bobby Brown. What happens to the rich when they're drug-addicted, versus the poor?"
To drive home this point, Seattle "Cracktivists" parodied the program, printing stickers offering cash to wealthy white women to get sterilized and posting them in upscale supermarkets.
Barbara Harris is, for lack of a better word, a hardass. Palpably angry about the tragedy of drug-exposed babies, her tough love is unfettered by political correctness. A July 1998 article on the website Salon opened with a quote from Harris saying drug-addicted women were "literally" having "litters" of babies; a similar quote made it into the pages of the U.K. edition of the women's magazine Marie Claire. And although Harris doesn't take credit for coming up with the turn of phrase, she doesn't back down from it, either. "There's more compassion in this country for animals than for children," she says with exasperation.
Harris addresses the program's detractors with similar impatience, calling allegations of racism "ridiculous." After all, though Harris is white, the children she adopted are black, as is her husband.
The complaint that CRACK fails to protect against STDs likewise fails to convince her. Drug addicts aren't having safe sex anyway, she counters. "They don't wear condoms, and they prostitute all day long for all for like, five bucks," she says, her voice curled with disgust.
Then there's sterilization. Everyone fixates on that, Harris says wearily. While there's no minimum age to participate in CRACK, Harris blithely dismisses the suggestion that young women who get sterilized will later regret their decision. They're more likely to regret having drug-addicted babies or abortions, she wagers. Besides, it's difficult to find a doctor who will perform sterilization on a young woman--she says her niece, a mother of two, had a hard time getting one. "I'm actually shocked when people are 23 or 24 and the doctors allow them to do that."
And don't get her started on the oft-repeated suggestion that she should be doing more to help drug-addicted women. "Everybody has a specialty. Our focus is getting these women on birth control. But people will say, 'Why are you doing this, why aren't you doing that?'" she fumes. "We don't solve all the world's problems."
As for her critics, Harris tosses it right back: "They want to tell us what we should be doing--what are they doing?"
Heather Keithley's IUD will keep her from getting pregnant for the next decade. She will be 31 then. In the dim glow of the television set, Keithley twirls a lock of hair on her finger and contemplates this. "I want to have another kid someday, but right now," she says, eyeing the towheaded 3-year-old in front of her, "he's all I can handle."
Keithley was a 17-year-old meth addict when she missed a Depo-Provera shot and got pregnant. She quit using immediately, she says, but it wasn't long after Cameron's birth that she started using again and got charged as an adult with possession of a controlled substance. The state took her son.
Eight months, one relapse and one drug-treatment program later, Keithley got clean and got Cameron back from foster care. They now live with two other single mothers--both recovering addicts with young sons--in an old wood-framed house off East Burnside Street.
The Department of Corrections owns the house and much of its contents, including the dingy sofa on which Keithley sits. She attends classes at PCC-Cascade and subsists on a patchwork of government assistance, including a $10 monthly allowance for things food stamps won't buy, like paper towels and aluminum foil.
She planned to get back on birth control after Cameron was born, but she never got around to it. When she heard she could get cash, though, she made it a priority.
Even though she has yet to receive her $200 check, Keithley is already singing the program's praises. Clients are eligible for a $50 bonus if they refer another eligible participant. "I pretty much refer every one of my female friends," Keithley says. "I think it's awesome."
Those interested in whining liberals and Planned Parenthood types crying about racism and anti-abortion sub-plots should click the link.
(Excerpt) Read more at wweek.com ...
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