Project Prevention (formerly Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity or CRACK) is an American non-profit organization that pays drug addicts cash for volunteering for long-term birth control, including sterilization.
Barbara Harris founded the organization in 1997 after she and her husband adopted the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth child of a drug-addicted mother.
[2] The organization has used slogans such as "Don't let pregnancy get in the way of your crack habit" and "She has her Daddy's eyes and her Mommy's heroin addiction".
[6] The organization responds by saying that they do not have the resources to solve "national problems of poverty, housing, nutrition, education and rehabilitation services.
Those resources we do have are spent to prevent a problem for $300 rather than paying millions after it happens in cost to care for a potentially damaged child.
In May 2010 a woman, not an addict, was leaving a clinic in Glasgow in what she described as "the Possilpark area—it's a well-known area for drugs" accompanied by her nine-year-old son when she was approached by three women who said they were from the organization and who offered her £200 if she agreed to be sterilized.
[15] Martin Barnes, CEO of DrugScope, said the organization's activities were exploitative, ethically dubious, and morally questionable.
[16] Harris admitted her methods amounted to bribery, but said it was the only way to stop babies being physically and mentally damaged by drugs during pregnancy.
In response Fiona Weldon, clinical director of Dublin addictions treatment facility, the Rutland Centre, said it was "absolutely horrendous", and that the organization was misguided and could be leaving itself open to litigation in the future.