An ad Project Prevention has used to encourage addicts to obtain long-term birth control. (Project Prevention via Facebook )

A controversial nonprofit group is seeking out drug-addicted women and paying them cold hard cash to get sterilized.

The group, Project Prevention, hangs stark ads in clinics and homeless shelters to reel in drug users. The posters feature hard-hitting taglines such as, "Don't let a pregnancy ruin your drug habit," and "She has her daddy's eyes ... and her mommy's heroin addiction."

Barbara Harris, founder of the program, insists she is only trying to help prevent unwanted pregnancies, which often lead to children being fed into an overwhelmed foster care system, and that she's not forcing anyone to get sterilized.

"I think it's really important for people to understand that the majority of women we sterilize are women who have had multiple children and don't want anymore," she told the Daily News. "It's their decision."

"And to say, 'Let's go ahead and let them keep having babies because one day they might decide to clean up and keep one?' It's just not fair," she said. "And it's preventable."

Harris said that the last 20 women she paid to get sterilized had been pregnant a total of 121 times.

"Thirty were either aborted, stillborn or died after being born," she said. "Seventy-eight are in foster care."

Betsy Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program and professor of Development Studies at Massachusetts' Hampshire College, has accused Project Prevention of "thinly disguised" racism.

"Project Prevention mainly targets women of color," Hartmann wrote on philanthropist George Soros' Open Society Foundation's blog.

"Essentially, while it targets specific vulnerable populations, it is trying to build support for eugenic and population control measures," she added.

Harris' mission to stop drug addicts from getting pregnant started when she adopted four children from a crack mom in Los Angeles.

"I witnessed firsthand how these innocent babies suffer after spending months in the womb on a steady diet of crack, alcohol, whatever their [birth mom] decides to try," she said.

In 1992, Harris got a call from a social worker. The same drug addicted woman was pregnant with her seventh child, and Harris was asked if she would adopt that one, too.

"My husband said, 'Barbara, I'm not buying a school bus,' because we had already sold our town home to buy a home with more bedrooms," she told the Daily News.

But Harris did take the baby, then later adopted yet another from the very same woman. She began Project Prevention in 1996.

The North Carolina-based program pays women $300 to get tubal ligations (permanent sterilization) or an IUD, Implanon or Depro-Provera shot (all forms of long-term birth control).

The group also gives men the same payout for vasectomies. But of the 4,097 people Project Prevention has paid, only 72 were men, Harris told the Daily News.

Depsite accusations of racism, Harris insisted her program does not target black women, and noted that about two-thirds of the women they have paid were white.

"If you're a drug addict, we're looking for you, and I don't care what color you are, because we don't even know what color your baby will be, because often these babies come out all different colors, you know what I mean?" Harris said in an interview with the addiction website, The Fix.

But critics aren't just crying racism - for years, opponents have said the group violates civil and human rights and should be illegal.

"Anything that involves permanent sterilization for money is a bad idea," Bioethicist Arthur L. Caplan, who takes over as head of the medical ethics program at New York University in June, told the Daily News.

"The women are too young, too impressionable to make that kind of irreversible choice," he said.

"I think it should be taken off the table completely. The solution to having babies when you're not ready is not to make more bad decisions."

Caplan said sex education and pushing women to enroll in addiction programs would be better solutions.

"Pregnancy and addiction are terrible problems," he said. "But they're not going to get solved by throwing a Band-Aid of $300 incentives to the poorest women with these problems."

Harris stressed that the majority of the women she pays opt for long-term birth control - not sterilization. Caplan added that while that's certainly a better option, it's still "ethically bizarre."

"You're out there focusing on one segment of the population," he said. "Why only focus on addicts? Not people with high blood pressure, diabetes? The notion that addiction is somehow passed on to future generations strikes me as bad science."

Regardless of the criticisms, there is still plenty of support for Project Prevention. It's Facebook page, where Harris posts updates about "clients" she still keeps in touch with, has nearly 2,000 "Likes."

Facebook user Bruce Thyer, who describes himself as a social worker, applauded the organization's efforts.

"As a social work professional, I applaud the great work being done by this organization to enable addicted individuals to not have to worry about getting pregnant, and to prevent the birth, without recourse to abortion, or babies to parents who are substance abusers and often not able to provide quality parenting," Thyer wrote.

"It was a brilliantly conceived idea and I only wish it would grow more quickly."

Copyright © 2021, New York Daily News

Copyright © 2021, New York Daily News