Licenses and Liberties

Until the stock market bit off more than it could chew this week, the talk topic had been “that woman”--nobody could summon her name to mind--who is offering $200 cash to any crack-addicted woman who got her tubes tied.

For the record, her name is Barbara Harris, and she lives in Orange County, where she and her husband have three teenagers of their own and four younger adopted kids--half of the eight crack babies born to the same addict mom in L.A. County.

Also for the record, Barbara Harris is white and her husband is black, which may give her some purchase in the minds of those who are about to take a deep breath and holler racism. When her first son was born--the one who has won so many leadership awards--Barbara’s mortified parents lied and told everyone he was Mexican. Years later, dying of cancer, Barbara’s mother, with her last breaths, sorrowed that her grandson wasn’t white.

After bringing up four crack babies, here is her reasoning:

“When everyone’s responsible for your children but you, that’s wrong. It’s a bigger picture than not wanting someone to have babies. They’re having addicted babies. . . . The argument has been, this’ll affect minority women. And I say, don’t minority babies matter?

“I’m glad we don’t live in a country where you don’t have rights, but my 6-year-old son has been force-fed drugs [as a fetus] and been shot [at random, as the family was driving home one Fourth of July] because someone has the right to have a baby, and someone else has the right to have a handgun. There should be a clause--you have a right to do this IF. . . .”

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We are not a country of moderation--not in ambition, not in appetite or attitude. Our national character is disinclined to half-measures.

When I lived in Britain, I was astonished to find paracetamol-codeine tablets sold over the counter; that could never happen here, where the FDA opted against a cholesterol-lowering drug for over-the-counter sales because Americans could not be trusted to be sensible about it. As one doctor testified, “ ‘I just ate McDonald’s, let me take this cholesterol drug’--this is the way people think.”

The slippery slope is not our native terrain. We like the flat plains of parity or the mountaintops of principle. To take one step off the pinnacle is to slide to the bottom. Ban armor-piercing bullets one day, the NRA warns, and the next day there won’t be so much as a BB gun left in the continental United States.

Now it’s cash-for-contraception for crack mothers--and who’s next on that slippery slope, we wonder immoderately: Drunk mothers? Teen mothers? Cancer mothers?

The stock market, after its scary swan-dive 10 years ago, put in trigger mechanisms to stop itself from panic-sliding all the way down the slippery slope. Can our judgment do the same?

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To drive a car in California requires a license, and passing a test to get that license. Until last year, you couldn’t buy a can of pepper spray without watching a half-hour training video or taking a test. The manicurist who lacquers your fingernails requires 400 hours of training. Yet creating another human being demands nothing more than a working set of his-and-hers plumbing.

That last is a right; everything else is a privilege. For a government to set the terms of that right invokes the ugly history of the eugenics movement, of Hitler and Lebensborn, of forced sterilization of “defectives.”

No limitation on that right can pass constitutional muster. (What would a right-to-parent test look like, anyway? Could my folks pass? Could Jeffrey Dahmer’s? Could Bill and Hillary?)

But Barbara Harris’ deal is voluntary, $200 for sterilization, $50 for Norplant, straightforward as a crop subsidy. Some call it an incentive, others call it a bribe. Family planners in India gave transistor radios to men who underwent vasectomies. Nowadays, we pay people to create babies; science and surrogacy contracts make babies who wouldn’t be conceived otherwise. Why not the converse?

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A while back, I was talking to Carl Djerassi, the eminent Stanford chemist, a “father” of the birth control pill and a pretty fine novelist, about paltry advances in birth control, and lamenting the unwanted infants abandoned in prom-night trash cans and neonatal wards.

In a tone both fanciful and wistful, he imagined a utopia where every youth of 16 makes copious deposits in secure and free sperm banks, then gets a vasectomy. When he wants to be a father, the laboratory would make a “withdrawal,” and then a “deposit” with the woman in question, guaranteeing that every child would be deliberately and not casually conceived.

I took it a step further: Grow every fetus in a high-tech, bedside baby aquarium--warm, secure, out of reach of a too-hot curry dinner, a two-pack-a-day parent, or a crack habit.

It won’t happen, and it won’t need to. Crack babies are coming of age. Any day now, one will handle this the American way: Hire a lawyer and sue mom.