Eugenik sätter stopp för okontrollerbar kriminalitet

Barbara Harris was working as a waitress in a southern California pancake house when she stumbled on the cause that would become her passion: saving America from the scourge of "crack babies". It was 1990, and she and her husband were asked to become foster parents to an eight-month-old girl born to a crack-cocaine-addicted mother. Over the next two years, they took in three more children born to the same woman, including one suffering from a neurological disorder that the Harrises were convinced was the result of damage incurred during pregnancy.

The idea that poor, drug-addicted women - most of them living in inner- city neighbourhoods antithetical to the white suburban landscape of Harris's home in Orange County - were having baby after baby without regard for their own or their children's well-being became her crusade. "These women literally have litters of children!" she later said in a series of provocative interviews. "They're not acting any more responsible than a dog on heat."

In the early 1990s she hooked up with a conservative state assemblyman and tried to introduce a radical new law that would have made it a crime for a woman to give birth to a drug-damaged child. When that initiative failed, in part because of concerns about its constitutionality, she decided to set up her own private initiative to encourage drug addicts to opt either for sterilisation or for long-term contraception such an IUD or a subcutaneous implant.

The result was an organisation that she initially called Crack, or Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity. Six years on, Crack - or Project Prevention, as it has been renamed in response to its more indignant critics - claims to have made successful interventions in almost 1,100 cases, and has set up chapters in 28 states. The deal that it offers drug addicts is straightforward: get yourself sterilised (a service usually offered free under the Medicaid public health programme), and you will be paid $ 200 (pounds 117) cash.

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Harris makes a powerful point when she argues that, for all the idealised talk about offering women drug treatment programmes, or reducing poverty, or improving health care and education, none of these is actually happening on anything like the scale required to address the problems. Project Prevention, she says, exists precisely to take some small positive step amid the dearth of public-policy initiatives.¹

Harris har rätt: den ständigt ökande kriminaliteten och fattigdomen löses inte genom dyra sociala reformer, utan genom att se till att människor som är genetiskt benägna till kriminellt beteende inte reproducerar sig. Ett friskt samhälle skulle framtvinga detta som lag, inte som en frivillig service.