Blog #3

Article: http://jezebel.com/5907514/group-pays-drug-addicted-women-to-get-sterilized-so-they-dont-have-litters-of-children?tag=reproductiverights



    The article posted above is essentially a satirical piece referencing a new group called Project Prevention formed by Barbara Harris that encourages addicted women to get sterilized so they don’t have to worry about getting pregnant and having “crack babies”. It is honestly quite ridiculous and the article uses much sarcasm to point out the absurdities of this group. When we discussed the issue of reproductive rights and addicted women I don’t think any of us meant let’s take away the rights by sterilization. This woman who founded the group is rather extreme in her views.

    In class we discussed the issues surrounding protecting the fetus and protecting the woman. In Gallagher’s article on page 347 it states, “it became possible to see and think of the fetus as separate from the woman within whose body it is carried.” Many policy makers in congress today seem to reject the notion that a fetus is housed in a womb. One cannot protect the fetus without protecting the womb the fetus is in for 9 months. But in the current issues of reproductive rights today, many seem to make that clear distinction easily. We can see that one woman, Barbara Harris founder of Project Prevention, has gone to the extreme of “protecting women” and “protecting the fetus” by removing the ability for an addicted woman to be “with child”. If that isn’t ignoring the larger issue behind reproductive rights and the addicted woman, I don’t know what is. Gallagher’s article also states of page 352, “But this insistence on pointing the finger of blame at individual women is an exercise in collective bad faith, a social-deception which rationalizes our passivity toward the genuinely horrifying living conditions confronting many poor women.”  Project Prevention misses the mark when it comes to helping addicted women. They are forgetting the larger picture and blaming the individual woman for her addiction and possibly inability to stay clean during her pregnancy and raise a healthy child. Project Prevention is also putting up fliers at methadone clinics and homeless shelters and hasn’t even marketed to middle or upper-class women; which renders the group even more problematic because they are assuming on poor women are addicted to drugs and further the stigma and stereotypes surrounding addicted women.