Making a choice

Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.

Sterilize yourself for cash. This should be a difficult decision.

Genesia Smith jumped on it. Twenty-four-years old and a mother of three, Smith was selling her body to support her itch: crack cocaine. So when Project Prevention promised Smith - "Hollywood" on the mean streets - $200 to take long-term birth control, she went for it: Depo-Provera shots every three months, for the money.

One year later Hollywood went back for more: a tubal ligation, and another $200 from Project Prevention.

That was 2002. Today Project Prevention pays active drug addicts and alcoholics $300 to get on long-term birth control; not pills, but shots, IUDs and tubal ligations. For men, vasectomies.

In nine years the nonprofit organization has paid 2,080 people, the vast majority being women, including 22 from Nevada.

And don't think Project Prevention founder Barbara Harris is going to apologize for her agenda: to cut the number of babies born to drug addicts or alcoholics down to zero.

Smith was just one more mommy through the mill.

"Call it a bribe, call it an incentive. Everybody is motivated by money, and drug addicts are no different," Harris said. "It doesn't matter what you call it. What matters is that it's working. It's the best $300 you can spend."

Project Prevention's critics never fail to fume and foam over statements like these.

At best, Harris' detractors accuse her of manipulating the addicted and impoverished.

At worst, they liken Project Prevention to new-school eugenics, a social purge painted to look like a public health campaign.

"These are people who are suffering from what we have called a disease - addiction. It's a brain disease. And Barbara Harris, she's going to come up and say, 'Hey, here's $300 to get sterilized,' " said Wyndi Anderson, a national educator for Harris' greatest moral adversary, the nonprofit National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

"Don't you see how that smacks of eugenics?"

Harris doesn't, and doesn't care. Her calling card is a wallet-sized photo in black and white of a baby crying. On top of the image, an agency slogan: "She has her father's eyes, and her mother's addiction."

This is the card Harris and her volunteers hand out when they surveil the streets, searching for new clients in old haunts: the back alleys of Anytown, USA.

Project Prevention has paid clients in 41 states.

"Our phones are ringing off the hook," Harris said. "I'm literally sitting at my desk, writing checks all day long."

In December Harris walked Owens Avenue in downtown Las Vegas, handing out cards to the crowd crouching outside a women's shelter.

"If you oppose what we do, if you believe these women have a right to keep popping out babies," Harris said, "then you better be ready to raise some yourself."

Smith was 15 when she had her first daughter, 17 when she had her second, 19 when she had her third. By the time she was 21, Smith was using crack. Within a few years, she was working for it. Smith can't remember how many times she was arrested, but Metro records can: 71 times between 1997 and 2006.

"Either you loved me, or you hated me," Smith said. "I was slim, I had long hair, I considered myself attractive, and a lot of women out there looked really bad. They were dirty, they didn't have hair, they looked really smoked out. So I got a lot of attention. I wasn't what you'd call a crack whore. I was getting prices that you wouldn't get in a crack area."

Smith's children stayed with their grandmother, until she got caught using. Then they went to a shelter.

"They were never exposed to my drugs," Smith said. "They just knew mother wasn't there because she had a problem."

In 2001, when Smith decided she was done, decided she wanted her kids back and wanted to get into drug treatment, a social worker told her to call Project Prevention.

"I had three kids, and I didn't think I wanted any more," Smith said.

To qualify for cash from Project Prevention, interested parties must prove they're addicts. This means they must send mug shots and arrest records, or documents detailing drug treatment from parole and probation officers or social workers. If they have a problem, Harris says, they have a paper trail.

Payment schedules differ according to birth control methods. Depo-Provera shots are given with $75 payment every three months, totaling $300 over a year. Women with IUD's get $75 after the device is inserted, $100 after six months and $125 at the end of the year. The graduated payments encourage dedication to the program, Harris says. "It just motivates them."

Women who get tubal ligations, however, and the 29 men who have gotten vasectomies, are paid a lump sum upon completion of the procedure. Critics call this an implicit attempt to encourage, perhaps manipulate, clients into choosing the essentially irreversible procedures.

Harris, who adopted four children from a crack-addicted mother of eight, has a canned comeback: "There is nothing positive that comes to a woman who gives birth to eight addicted babies. These kids are born with the cards stacked against them. The cycle just repeats itself."

Last summer Harris loaded her adopted children into a trailer and drove from California to North Carolina, preaching the Project Prevention word with her homegrown proof: "Not all children are as lucky as mine," she said.

Still, academics and activists question the ethics of making money the motivating factor for undergoing any medical procedure.

Others wonder whether people under the influence can really make a reasonable decision about their reproductive self.

Like every other criticism, Harris has heard it before, and flips the attack in her own defense: "It's just common sense. If you can't trust them with this decision, how can you trust them with a child?"

Although Harris has made some accommodations.

Project Prevention was initially called Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity, or C.R.A.C.K. She changed the name to appease her skeptics, who thought the title suggested she was targeting black women. The group has paid more whites than blacks and Hispanics combined.

And she's been forced to clarify a particularly controversial quote, one Harris says she was paraphrasing from a client: "We don't allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children."

Project Prevention volunteers were once ambushed in California by chanting protesters who spit on Harris as she escaped in a convertible. In that moment, she was afraid for her life. But afterward, the bad press was so good it was worth it.

"I thought I was going to die that day. But it's alright," she said. "Everything happens for a reason. That brought us huge coverage and a lot of donors."

Project Prevention lives on donations, some from high-profile conservatives with deep pockets; Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Texas venture capitalist Jim Woodhill, billionaire Richard Scaife.

Harris' largest donor, her "guardian angel," remains anonymous. The organization is still too controversial for him to come out of the closet. Harris doesn't mind - she speaks with the calm confidence of someone who's certain, someone whose pet project is groomed with guarantees from a masked money man.

"I truly believe in what I'm doing. My heart is for children," Harris said. "These mothers are not going to get pregnant, and that's a peaceful feeling for me. I just don't understand why it's so controversial."

Neither does Smith, who got a tubal ligation after a year of birth control shots. Afterward, Smith tried to get friends interested.

"Paying $300 to get a person's tubes tied now is better than paying thousands of dollars for the 18 years these children are on welfare and food stamps and medicaid and foster homes," she said.

But Smith's friends wouldn't bite.

"They were just too far gone," she said.

Next year Harris hopes to up the ante, offering prospective Project Prevention clients more money to go on birth control, or quit having babies altogether. She knows what works: "The more money, the more people notice."

Smith is living with two of her daughters deep in North Las Vegas. She looks away when asked about regret.

She wants to have a son.

"They're tied," she says. "They're not burnt."

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