The BBC reports on the rising popularity of sterilizing West Coast drug addicts--mostly women--as a way of alleviating the social burdens presented by their children. "Project Prevention," as it is now called, pays documented addicts $200, no strings attached (read drug money), to be sterilized. Of course, the California-based program sounds an awful lot like a eugenics plan designed to keep "defectives" or "undesirables" from reproducing. This country’s earlier experimentation with negative eugenics resulted in thousands of sterilized "feeble-minded" folks. Virginia, for example, sterilized over 8000 people from 1930 to 1980 during one of the most tragic and widespread eugenics programs in our history. It’s particularly disturbing then to note that Project Prevention has already claimed over 1000 wombs in under five years.
But surely what was objectionable about the eugenics movement was not the principle that there are some people who simply ought not reproduce. The problem with the eugenecists was that they used spurious criteria (i.e., race and ethnicity) to determine who those people were and, moreover, they engaged in their practices without the consent of those being sterilized.
IT’S JUST WRONG!!!
I feel that these women and men should not be sterilized, for the simple fact that they have the right to bare children just like any other human being. I also feel that it is against god. Honestly no one should be sterilized, because it is against GOD’S WILL. I think that everything happens for a reason, and maybe they are ment to have children. If anything these addicts should be getting paid a couple hundreds of dollars to go to rehab. Then that would cut back the cost of having to pay medical bill.