The real economic advantage to the poor and desperate is, probably, having the burden of worrying about pregnancy and the costs of medical care / abortion / child-raising lifted off their shoulders.

At a higher cost, I’d agree it’s exploitative. At that level, I’m more asking – why limit it to drug addicts? There are a LOT of people who might benefit from the service.

I wasn’t aware that Medicare covered Norplant — that seems odd, given that it’s a federal program mainly for senior citizens and people with permanent disabilities, which I don’t think substance addiction is classified as being. Do you mean Medicaid (state-run program for low-income families)?

I heard about Harris’s program a few years on a libertarian blog (Jill at Feministe and Ann at Feministing posted about it back then as well) and attempted to explain to the folks there why it was problematic. You can imagine the uphill battle.

Seriously.

Also please stop referring to people with drug addition problems as “junkies” on my blog. If you cannot engage show basic respect for the women you’re speaking about, you will be banned.

xBut I’m also unsure what the goal of offering free sterilization or long-term reversible contraception to people addicted to drugs or alcohol would be. I think that in itself could be viewed as coercive, firstly, if short-term contraceptive options (pill, depro) are not also made free. There was this very problem with Norplant a few years back — government subsidizing Norplant for poor women but not other options, believed precisely because of its long-term nature. This made eligible women feel like they had no choice but to go with Norplant if they wanted to prevent pregnancy, and ended up regretting it greatly due to side effects and other issues.

Well, it’s not as if Norplant has to be long-term, does it? You can always get it taken out early, I would think.

Presumably the point of giving them long-term contraception is that it is low-maintenance; so that the person does not need to remember it every day or every time they have sex.

As for why women are targeted: because it’s more efficient. Unless a woman is monogamous, it is more efficient to give her contraception than to make certain that all of her male sex partners take contraception (and because sterilization is the only long-term option available for men currently). Take five women and five men where each of the men has sex with each of the women. Sterilizing or getting some currently non-existent long-term contraceptive to four of the men and you could still have each of the women getting pregnant. Do it to four of the women and you have reduced the expected number of pregnancies by 80%.

When talking about the long-term contraception – as opposed to the sterilization – I fail to see the problem here, unless you are arguing that we should not as a society be discouraging active (as opposed to recovering) drug addicts from having children. I’m sorry, but if you are a junkie, you shouldn’t be having children until you sober up. Maybe this offends your sense of bodily autonomy, but it’s just common sense.

Drug rehabilitation would be a good place. Drug addiction prevention would also work. Even better, so would advocating for policies whereby the state provides treatment services instead of locking addicts up in jail! This would not only reduce the number of addicted pregnant women, but the number of addicted people, period.

That we should be doing this as well does not mean that the contraceptive program is a bad thing. First of all, there will be some addicts even if we do these things, so the problem of drug addicts having kids will still exist even if we reduce the number of addicts, and second of all, the solutions you mention are long-term and even if we implement them, we need to do something NOW to prevent junkies from having kids they cannot take care of whilke we wait for the long-term projects to take effect.

1. It’s my understanding that men are less likely to undergo permanent sterilization overall, despite the procedure being easier. I know the rates have been changing slightly over the years, so this may have very recently changed, but the last time I checked, it was the case.

2. Men are far, far, far, far, far less likely to be adversely affected by an unwanted pregnancy. Meaning that I wouldn’t at all be surprised if many of the woman do want some kind of contraception, but this is all that they can get.

3. They’re specifically targeting women. They hardly talk about men at all on their site, and a fetus doesn’t live inside a man’s body to see the ill effects of drug use. They do keep the program open to men just so they can say that they do and try to stave off critics like myself. Coercive reproductive practices have historically almost always targeted women. This one isn’t any different.

I think probably many of these women want this – )drug addict women induce early birth all the time by over using the drug (intentionally). Talk to any Neonatal doc in a city) They don’t want the baby, that’s for sure and they leave the babies there, never to return, by and large.
Now, in the perfect world, this would be coupled with rehab. Would you think the same coercive action was in place if $300 was offered for a woman or man to go into rehab? Has anyone spoken to the women who have taken up this offer? Do you know some Knoxvillans who are organizing alternatives to this?