Ronnie Polaneczky | It pays to get clean before getting pregnant
BARBARA HARRIS has the best idea I've ever heard to keep children from being born addicted to booze or alcohol, or from being raised by parents who are:
BARBARA HARRIS has the best idea I've ever heard to keep children from being born addicted to booze or alcohol, or from being raised by parents who are:
Prevent the kids from being conceived in the first place.
Harris is founder of Project Prevention, a nonprofit agency that pays addicts and alcoholics $300 a year to use birth control, which Project Prevention pays for.
The organization is based in North Carolina, but once a year Harris takes its 30-foot RV on a road trip throughout America, spreading her message - through fliers and street-corner stops - of pregnancy postponement.
Last week, Harris spent a sweltering day in Philly, after a long drive from Albany.
She was traveling with her four adopted children - all siblings born to the same crack-addicted mother, who'd already had four other children taken from her - along with a grandchild and the eldest of her six biological sons.
I caught up with her as the family shopped for groceries at a Northeast Philly shopping center.
It was easy to spot their RV:
It was the one with the photo of a squalling newborn on one side, above the words, She has her daddy's eyes, and her mommy's heroin addiction.
The other side depicted a pregnant junkie with a needle in her arm.
It read: Attention Drug Addicts and Alcoholics - Get Birth Control and Get Cash.
Call 1-888-30-CRACK today.
Help prevent babies from being born addicted to drugs. Together we can prevent a human tragedy.
Talk about a rubber-necking highway distraction.
"Why subject a newborn to addiction and fetal alcohol syndrome?" asked Harris, 55, as her family cooled off in the RV, whose main cabin had the feel of a comfortably messy rec room.
"And think of what it does to a woman when she loses her kids because she's too strung out to take care of them.
"If she focused on getting clean before becoming a mother, think of the heartache it would prevent."
Last month, my colleague Dana DiFilippo wrote about how new studies are showing that drugged-out parenting does far more to doom a child to a life of crime - as a perpetrator or a victim - than does a baby's drug exposure in utero.
"Nothing has devastated our children more than being raised in drug-addicted households in which they fail to receive the basic benefits of love," Julia Danzy, head of the city's division of social services, told DiFilippo.
Good parenting can help overcome the effects of a child's being born addicted, DiFilippo reported.
But good parenting is rare in households torn apart by addiction.
As we all know, good foster care can be an equal crapshoot. Too many kids are bounced for years from home to home, waiting for someone in their biological family to get it together enough to take them back.
"How is that fair to a child?" Harris asked last week. "We can keep the cycle from happening if an addict would just use birth control."
It makes utter sense to me.
That's why I slap my head when I hear how detractors like the National Advocates for Pregnant Women describe Project Prevention as "a program and an ideology that is at the core of civil rights violations and eugenic population-control efforts."
"Those people are educated idiots," said Harris, a term she has used often in describing those whom she feels put philosophical belief before cruel reality when judging her organization's actions.
Others have labeled Harris, who is white, a racist, assuming that she targets African-Americans for birth-control intervention - itself a racist assumption, said Harris, since roughly half of her clients have been white.
For the record, Harris added, her husband is black, their biological kids are bi-racial and their adopted children are African-American.
"My husband says that if I were black, what we do wouldn't even be an issue," said Harris.
At least what she does isn't an issue to the private donors and foundations that support Project Prevention, which has enrolled just over 2,200 clients since its founding in 1999.
"We hear from women all the time who thank us for helping them," she said.
"We give them a chance to focus on getting out of their addiction before adding a baby into their lives.
"If they won't stop using drugs or alcohol, that's their choice.
"But we can help them from harming a child in the process." *
For more information: www.projectprevention.org.
E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns: