Darwinism for Junkies

[Gob]

Charity offers UK drug addicts £200 to be sterilised


Drug addicts across the UK are being offered money to be sterilised by an American charity.

Project Prevention is offering to pay £200 to any drug user in London, Glasgow, Bristol, Leicester and parts of Wales who agrees to be operated on.

The first person in the UK to accept the cash is drug addict "John" from Leicester who says he "should never be a father".

The move has been criticised by some drug charities who work with addicts.

Project Prevention founder Barbara 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.

Drug treatment charity Addaction estimates one million children in the UK are living with parents who abuse drugs.

Pregnant addicts can pass on dependency to the unborn child, leading to organ and brain damage.

Mrs Harris set up her charity in North Carolina after adopting the children of a crack addict.
Damage to children

Speaking to the BBC's Inside Out programme, she said: "The birth mother of my children obviously dabbled in all drugs and alcohol - she literally had a baby every year for eight years.

"I get very angry about the damage that drugs do to these children."

After paying 3,500 addicts across the United States not to have children, she is now visiting parts of the UK blighted by drugs to encourage users to undergo "long-term birth control" for cash.

John, a 38-year-old addict from Leicester, is the first person in the UK to accept money to have a vasectomy, after being involved in drugs since he was 12.

He said: "It was something that I'd been thinking about for a long time.

"I won't be able to support a kid; I can just about manage to support myself."

Simon Antrobus, chief executive of Addaction, said while no-one wanted to see children brought up in a drug-using environment, there was no place for Project Prevention in the UK.

"It exploits very vulnerable people who are addicted to drugs and alcohol at probably the lowest point in their lives," he said.

The Reverend Robert Black, of Victory Outreach, which works with former addicts in east London, said he thought Project Prevention's aims were "very devious".

Maria Cripps, project manager at the Hackney Dovetail Centre which works with drug users and their carers, said: "I think Barbara uses some very extreme examples to get her point across. It might work in America but Great Britain is a very different country."

But Reverend Martin Blakebrough, director of Camden's Kaleidoscope Project in north London, said sterilisation was "worth considering" if it was right for the individual.

A spokesperson at the British Medical Association said: "The BMA's ethics committee does not have a view on the charity Project Prevention.

"As with all requests for treatment, doctors need to be confident that the individual has the capacity to make the specific decision at the time the decision is required.

"The BMA's ethics committee also believes that doctors should inform patients of the benefits of reversible contraception so that the patients have more reproductive choices in the future."


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lo ... print=true

[SisterMaryFellatio]

Shame we can't sterilise more of the population than just the junkies......paedophiles would be top of my list!

[loCAtek]

Oh no, pedophiles should be castrated; same thing but different.

[Andrew D]

Oh no, pedophiles should be castrated; same thing but different.

Because, of course, there are no female pedophiles.

[Andrew D]

Voluntary sterilization is intrinsically good. It is a choice. And a good one. It helps put off such things as governmentally forced sterilization and abortion, both of which we have already seen at least in the People's Republic of China and are very likely to see in a lot more places if we don't stop breeding like rabbits. It tends toward population reduction, which we and our posterity very much (will) need. It has no significant downside.

(And to forestall the personal questions, in my case, it would be redundant. As I have mentioned before, my wife is 60. No sterilization is required to stop our having offspring (which neither of us ever wanted). Nature has taken care of that for us, thank you very much.)

[loCAtek]

Oh no, pedophiles should be castrated; same thing but different.

Because, of course, there are no female pedophiles.

Good point, but decidedly not as prevalent.

[oldr_n_wsr]

Isn't voluntary sterilization covered under the UK's health plan? what do these people need, and insentive on top of it?

[Scooter]

Voluntary sterilization is intrinsically good.

I think one of the questions raised by this program is precisely whether it's really voluntary if you wave £200 in the face of an addict. I too would have thought that sterilization would have been covered by the NHS, if not, then paying the cost of the sterilization (directly to the provider) would be one thing; offering an addict a means to maintain his/her high into the middle of next week could be seen as coercion. It's sort of like when you offer someone starving on the streets of India $10,000 for a kidney.

I get that they are trying to prevent the terrible suffering that children born to addicts often have to endure, but the line between the protection of children and eugenics is pretty thin here, and that makes me uneasy.

I don't like the message it sends to addicts either. They are essentially writing off any possibility that addicts will one day be healthy enough to be capable of having children. In most cases that might very well be true, but tell an addict that you don't expect him/her to ever get sober and you will create a self-fulfilling prophecy, or worse. The prospect, however faint, of having a "normal" life again someday can sometimes be the only thing that keeps an addict from doing an OD. Sending an addict the message that "no, you can't ever have that" could be fatal.

[loCAtek]

Sterilization is not permanent , it is reversible. Harder for the females, granted, but not impossible.

[Scooter]

How many people do you know who got sterilizations with the intent of reversing them later on? Do you imagine that when these people are being cajolled into getting steriized they are being told they can have it reversed later on if they manage to get sober?

What they are being told is that society has written them off.

[loCAtek]

I know a few men with vasectomies, who prefer that to full castration. They don't want to father more children, but they don't want to be permanently sterile either.


It's called voluntary 'Long-term Birth Control'; I think that's better than unwanted children they can't support.

[Scooter]

So the answer to my question is "none".

I'm sure that women who wish to be sterilized prefer tubal ligation to hysterectomy as well. Perhaps that's because neither castration nor hysterectomy is used when sterilization is sole purpose to be achieved.

Just because men don't want to start singing soprano, or women don't want to grow beards, doesn't mean they don't intend their sterizations to be permanent.

[Andrew D]

This particular program is evidently aimed at and limited to drug addicts. That is , in my opinion, unfortunate.

Voluntary sterilization should be offered to everyone. It sure beats all hell out of involuntary sterilization, and if we don't grow up and start behaving like adults, involuntary sterilization is inevitable.

[Gob]

Isn't voluntary sterilization covered under the UK's health plan? what do these people need, and insentive on top of it?

It is free, but there are waiting lists.

In most parts of the UK, a vasectomy is available free of charge under the NHS. However, waiting lists can be several months, depending on where you live.

Speak to your GP about availability of vasectomies in your area. As waiting lists for vasectomies can be long, some men choose to pay to have the procedure carried out privately.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Vasectomy/ ... tion2.aspx

Why do these people need the incentive? They don't, it's just some American charity trying to "do good" as they see it.

[rubato]

I've advocated it at the CSB for years, cash payments for sterilization.

Anything up to $10,000 would be easily worth it.

A huge savings for society overall.

yrs,
rubato

[oldr_n_wsr]

I'll have it done again for $10K.

[Jarlaxle]

$10K in cash and all medical expenses paid? Even figuring the time out of work (week? 2 weeks?), I say hell yes.

[loCAtek]

Sign me up, I'm an addict!

[oldr_n_wsr]

$10K in cash and all medical expenses paid? Even figuring the time out of work (week? 2 weeks?), I say hell yes.

It's only about 3 days recovery.

[Jarlaxle]

I have a very physical job...I'd take a week, not worth risking complications.