OverseasFuture
Interview: Barbara Harris Founder of C.R.A.C.K. (Children Requiring A Caring Kommunity)
By Steve Sailer, UPINational Correspondent
LOS ANGELES, (UPI) -- When you meet BarbaraHarris, it's hard to figure out how old she is. Her youthful looksdon't seem to match her eventful life story.
After a couple of decades of being a waitressat International House of Pancakes while raising her three sons,she spent seven years as a stay-at-home mom for her four new adoptedchildren, all siblings whose mother was a drug addict. Then, in1997, she founded one of America's most innovative and controversialcharities, C.R.A.C.K. (Children Requiring A Caring Kommunity),which pays addicts $200 to use long-term contraception or getsterilized.
According to her Web site CashForBirthControl.com,584 women (and eight men) have taken Harris up on her offer. Herclients have 1,102 of their children in the foster-care system.Another 231 of their babies have been stillborn or died shortlyafterward. The women had also had 993 abortions.
Long-term birth control was the choice of57 percent of the women, while the others picked tubal ligation.About half her clients have been white and another one third wereblack.
Harris is a large, cheerful woman of impressiveenergy. Her long, dark blonde hair and almost line-free face suggestshe's in her 30s. But then she tells you that she has three grandchildrenby her oldest son, who is 30. And her second son, a senior atStanford, just got married. It turns out she is 48. Perhaps hersecret is that she doesn't spend a lot of time fretting over herworries. Instead, she responds with direct, vigorous action.
Harris, who is often denounced as a "racist,"is a white woman who lives with her African-American husband Smitty,a surgical technician, in a non-descript but pleasant sectionof Orange County, Calif., called Stanton. Mixed-race familiesare not a particularly big deal in this suburb near where TigerWoods grew up.
I met with Harris at C.R.A.C.K.'s three-roomsuite in a low concrete office building in nearby Garden Grove.While most articles about Harris have concentrated on the ideologicalarguments that have pitted her organization against representativesof the ACLU and the NAACP, I was more interested in what motivatedher.
Q. Where did you growup?
A. All over the place. I didn't know untilrecently that it was because my father was running from payingchild support! I have four stepsisters and my father and motherhad four of us.
Q. How many childrendo you have?
A. I have three birth sons (ages 30, 21,and 20) and two sons and two daughters who are adopted (ages 12through 8).
Q. When did you decideto adopt?
A. In 1990, but I actually wasn't planningon adopting any children, I just wanted to get a little girl becauseI had all boys. So, I decided to be a foster parent because Ithought I could have little girls and dress them up and fix theirhair and play with them and give them back. My husband didn'twant us to become foster parents. He said, "Barbara, there'sno way you're going to be able to get a baby and give it backa year later." I honestly believed at the time that wasn'tgoing to be a problem, because I thought that these aren't myown kids and I won't love them like my own kids.
The first baby that was placed with us wasDestiny. She was 8 months old. I found out when we got her thatshe had four older sisters. She was the fifth baby born to thesame drug addict. When Destiny was born, she tested positive forcrack, PCP and heroin. That was actually the first time I everrealized that babies were born addicted to drugs. I had nevereven considered that pregnant women could be drug addicts andhaving babies. Destiny was 8 months old, so I didn't have to seeher withdrawing from drugs.
That was something I didn't experience untilfour months later when her brother was born. We got a phone callfrom the social worker telling us that we had gotten another babyboy and the mother didn't want him. I called my husband at workand we decided to take him because the older four children werein four separate homes.
It wasn't until I picked Isaiah up fromthe hospital and saw how he suffered that it had the full impacton me. He was just miserable for months. He couldn't sleep, hecouldn't keep food down, and his eyes were like they'd pop outof his head. Noises scared him, lights scared him. It was nothinglike the experience I had bringing my birth children home.
I started to get very angry at the factthat the mother was allowed to do this. Not once, twice but sixtimes. That's when I got angry, because I talked to other fosterparents and found out that there were lots of addicted women outthere having babies every year.
Some kids will never be normal. We hearstories in the office about kids dying, kids having brain damage.But my kids are four of the more fortunate ones and they don'tseem to have problems. They are more emotional than my birth kidsare, but they are all doing good in school and are all very wellbehaved.
Q. Your husband Smittysounds like quite a guy.
A. Every time we'd get a phone call fromthe social worker saying she had another baby -- because thathappened twice more, with Taylor and Brandon -- he'd get frustrated.He'd say, "Barbara, we just can't taking this lady's kids."We'd already had all of our own kids, and they were grown andin college, and now we have four more kids in elementary school.But, what can you do? Obviously, he's very patient to put up withme, because most husbands wouldn't have done it. But I wantedto do it, and he did it for me. He doesn't regret it now.
Q. What did your sonsthink?
A. They loved it. They were very excited.Whenever I'd get the call from the social worker that she hadanother baby, they'd be in the cheering section in the backgroundwhen I'd call Smitty at work. "One more, Daddy, just onemore," they'd call out. He was outnumbered; he never stooda chance. Poor Smitty.
Q. Suddenly, you'vegone from three children to seven children in three years. Wheredid you fit everybody?
A. I stopped waitressing right after Destiny.We used to have a condo, then we upgraded to a house, then weadded on to the house. Everybody fits. We had a car and had toget a van and eventually a bigger van. Then my husband told me,"We're not buying a school bus."
Q. How did you getstarted as an activist?
A. I actually started by calling the policedepartment and asking them if I could press charges against thedrug addict for child endangerment and make a citizen's arrest.But they told me no, there was nothing that could be done. So,I started writing to all the politicians and getting back theirstandard letter that they send to everybody, no matter what theywrite about.
I started looking for California state legislatorswho would support a bill. I finally found an assemblyman in Cerritos,who told me he'd author the bill. So, we wrote it and it passedthe Health and Safety Committee. The assemblyman had all the voteshe needed for it to pass. But then the governor's right hand manstood up and shared publicly for the first time about the personaldrug problems he had had, and by the time he was done, everybodyin the room felt so sorry for drug addicts that the sponsor knewit wouldn't pass.
So, I called Prof. Robert A. Pugsley, alaw professor at Southwestern U. that I had been working with,and asked him "What if we offered these drug addicts moneyto use birth control? Can we do that?" He called back a coupleof weeks later and told me he'd talked to the district attorney'soffice. They said they couldn't see any reason we couldn't doit.
We had $400 that had been donated by anattorney who works at Children's Court, and we started hangingsigns. When I got that first call, I was so excited. She was havingher sixth baby and wanted a tubal ligation. Then the sister ofa drug addict here in Orange County pleaded with me to offer hersister this option because she had five or six babies and thefamily was torn apart.
I had a press conference in my front yard.I had no clue how many people would be interested in what I wasdoing. There were news trucks up and down and around and peoplefrom New York! Everybody wanted to know about what we were doing.I guess it had never been done and it's not being done anywhereelse. People have been coming from other countries to hear aboutthis.
Q. What kind of reactionsdo you get from the families of addicts?
A. They're very grateful. We just got acall from this woman who lives at Travis Air Force Base whoseniece was an addict. She said, "Please make her an offer."They'd considered doing it as a family, but they knew that ifthey made her an offer themselves, out of spite she wouldn't doit. So, we offered the niece more money, $500. The family waswilling to pay it.
Q. Why only eightmen so far?
A. Men don't have many options (just vasectomies),so they don't follow through. When they hear what they have todo, they go, "Ooh, I'm not doing that." And in mostcases it's not drug-addicted men who are getting these women pregnant-- it's johns that they prostitute with all day long for $5 aperson. One of the women who came through our program had 14 babies.She doesn't know who the fathers are, and that's usually the case.A lot of times they don't even know what race the kids are. Howsad is that?
Q. Why were you theone who had the courage to try this?
A. To, me it's simple. There's no rationalreason why a drug addict or alcoholic should get pregnant. Thosewho oppose us can't offer a reason; they just oppose us. And mostwho oppose us are not willing to adopt any of these kids. Unlessyou're willing to take the next baby home, your opinion meansnothing to me.
They just accuse us, but nobody has a bettersolution. To me, this is just common sense, but a lot of peopledon't have common sense I've learned. They don't teach commonsense in college.
But we really don't have that many opposingus. Overwhelming support is what we have from the public.