Selective Breeding

Eugenics is apparently gaining favor again.

A flier hanging on a pole in Brooklyn looks, at first glance, as if it might offer a room for rent or a job. There are phone numbers, dollar signs and tabs for people to tear off and take with them.

But the offer is intended for a specific group: drug-addicted men and women. "Get birth control, get cash," the flier reads. "If you are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol then this offer is for you."

While offers of birth control to drug addicts are common — distribution of condoms in particular, as a means not only for birth control but also to stem the spread of AIDS — this offer is much more radical. It offers men and women $200 to be sterilized or put on long-term birth control.

The group making the offer, Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity, or Crack, contends that the program is a humane effort to keep children from being born to women ill-equipped to raise them. Critics counter that it is little more than a bribe to women to make an irreversible decision, and argue that counseling is the best method for both ending drug use and promoting responsible parenthood.

More on CRACK in this 1999 ZNet Commentary by Betsy Hartmann.