On July 26 IEET Executive Director J. Hughes joined lawyer Thomas Morris, behavioral economist Gary Charness and Barbara Harris, founder of Project Prevention to discuss the ethics of Project Prevention's mission: paying men and women addicted to drugs to use contraception or have vasectomies and tubal ligations.
Dr. Hughes statement on the question:
Barbara Harris' initiative is an ethical one insofar as it reduces the suffering of the people it convinces not to have children, of the potential children they might have had, and of society in general. Paying people with severe mental health and substance abuse issues $300 to have vasectomies or implant IUDs or long-term contraception is not the same as the eugenics of the early 20th century. Instead of using racist, pseudo-scientific ideas about the inheritance of criminality to enforce involuntary sterilization, this program makes the perfectly reasonable assumption that it would be better for the person struggling with the problem, and for any children they might have, if they make a voluntary choice to not have children. Reversible forms of vasectomy would be preferable to irreversible forms, as IUDs and contraceptive implants are preferable to tubal ligations, but in general we need to presume that people with these problems are capable of exercising informed and free consent. If they aren't capable of making this decision then they aren't capable of consenting to sex that could lead to pregnancy. To deny them the opportunity to make a choice between compensation and their fertility is to infantilize and patronize them.
On the other hand this program will have no measurable impact on poverty, mental illness or substance abuse in general so long as it is a nonprofit initiative. It would have to be a federal program to have a measurable impact, just as the legalization of abortion in the 1970s had a measurable impact on lowering the incidence of unwanted children, which in turn reduced juvenile delinquency and crime in the 1990s. The impact of poverty on children is as severe as the impact of being raised (or not raised) by parents with substance abuse problems. Even a federal program offering compensation for contraception is unlikely to have much of an impact on poverty since only serious structural reforms in social welfare, education and public employment will move that needle. At best this would be a useful adjunct to larger reforms.
On July 26 IEET Executive Director J. Hughes joined lawyer Thomas Morris, behavioral economist Gary Charness and Barbara Harris, founder of Project Prevention to discuss the ethics of Project Prevention's mission: paying men and women addicted to drugs to use contraception or have vasectomies and tubal ligations.
Dr. Hughes statement on the question:
Barbara Harris' initiative is an ethical one insofar as it reduces the suffering of the people it convinces not to have children, of the potential children they might have had, and of society in general. Paying people with severe mental health and substance abuse issues $300 to have vasectomies or implant IUDs or long-term contraception is not the same as the eugenics of the early 20th century. Instead of using racist, pseudo-scientific ideas about the inheritance of criminality to enforce involuntary sterilization, this program makes the perfectly reasonable assumption that it would be better for the person struggling with the problem, and for any children they might have, if they make a voluntary choice to not have children. Reversible forms of vasectomy would be preferable to irreversible forms, as IUDs and contraceptive implants are preferable to tubal ligations, but in general we need to presume that people with these problems are capable of exercising informed and free consent. If they aren't capable of making this decision then they aren't capable of consenting to sex that could lead to pregnancy. To deny them the opportunity to make a choice between compensation and their fertility is to infantilize and patronize them.
On the other hand this program will have no measurable impact on poverty, mental illness or substance abuse in general so long as it is a nonprofit initiative. It would have to be a federal program to have a measurable impact, just as the legalization of abortion in the 1970s had a measurable impact on lowering the incidence of unwanted children, which in turn reduced juvenile delinquency and crime in the 1990s. The impact of poverty on children is as severe as the impact of being raised (or not raised) by parents with substance abuse problems. Even a federal program offering compensation for contraception is unlikely to have much of an impact on poverty since only serious structural reforms in social welfare, education and public employment will move that needle. At best this would be a useful adjunct to larger reforms.
http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/non-profit-pays-addicts-not-to-have-kids/51e9bc852b8c2a354b0004cf
Reversible forms of vasectomy would be preferable to irreversible forms, as IUDs and contraceptive implants are preferable to tubal ligations, but in general we need to presume that people with these problems are capable of exercising informed and free consent. If they aren't capable of making this decision then they aren't capable of consenting to sex that could lead to pregnancy. To deny them the opportunity to make a choice between compensation and their fertility is to infantilize and patronize them.