When I read the headline today, I was immediately reminded of early-century eugenics programs that were so popular across the Western world that they largely informed the Nazi holocaust. Apparently a US organisation is giving monetary incentives to encourage drug addicts to get sterilized.

The organisation calls itself Project Prevention and is headed by Barbara Harris, who intends to pay $300 to drug addicts on the provision they get long-term contraception or seek sterilization. The organisation was founded in 1997 and is funded through private donations and is not-for-profit. So far, it claims to have given funds to over 3200 drug-addicted “clients,” of whom more than 1200 are women who have been permanently sterilized.

Apparently Harris is driven by her own experience, having adopted the four children of a crack-addicted woman in Los Angeles. She says of the second of the four, Taylor:

“He couldn’t keep food down and his eyes looked like they were going to bulge out of his head,” she says. “Noise bothered him, light bothered him, he just couldn’t sleep.

“My husband and I had to take shifts with him. He would sleep 10 minutes, wake up screaming. I was just angry at his mom, I thought how could somebody do this to a baby?”

I admire that this woman has concern for disadvantaged children born into pretty terrible circumstances. However, sterilization is clearly not the solution. It’s not the solution for the simple reason that drug addiction is not a permanent state. And offering money as an incentive to get sterilised is preying upon the vulnerabilities of addicts, whom I hear will take rather drastic measures to get funding for their next hit. Harris understands this of drug addicts and uses their disease against them. Surely this is based on a prejudicial idea about the social capacity of people with addictions – that they can never recover and become productive members of society or good parents. It’s a campaign of social engineering – a way of preventing people with a problem from ever reproducing. Surely these funds could be better used in drug education, awareness, prevention campaigns, or safe-needle houses, or prenatal care facilities for vulnerable and/or disadvantaged people.