The epiphany came in 2008, at the end of her second pregnancy.
Longtime crack addict Kelly ruined nine months of clean living just days before her baby was born with a weekend drug binge. Her infant son tested positive for crack at birth, and social services took him away from her.
“I just said, ‘That’s it. I’m done. I’m done with the drugs, and I’m done with the babies,’ ” said Kelly, who grew up in Astoria, Queens.
Now 38 and living in Baltimore, Kelly — who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her identity — took $300 in May to have her tubes tied.
“I have no regrets about the sterilization. Babies and drugs don’t mix. My kids are the ones who pay for my partying, and I didn’t want to do that to another one. I love them, they are everything to me — I don’t want to smoke their lives away,” she said.
The money, and funding for the procedure, came from Project Prevention, a controversial North Carolina nonprofit that offers drug addicts cash if they take long-term birth control or undergo permanent sterilization.
Since it started 13 years ago, Project Prevention claims to have paid 1,321 women to get their tubes tied. It’s paid another 3,617 about $200 a year to go on long-term birth control, said group founder Barbara Harris. Male addicts are eligible, too — about 47 have taken money to undergo vasectomies.
Critics call the program eugenics. It’s also been accused of targeting poor and minority communities, but Harris, 58, said its outreach is not race-based. So far, 1,822 Caucasians, 944 African-Americans, 459 Hispanics and 396 from other ethnic groups have used Project Prevention services, she said.
One obstetrician who works with drug-addicted pregnant women at a North Carolina hospital said Project Prevention’s cash incentives amounted to bribery.
“We need to focus on treatment rather than on this sort of strategy of sterilization of an entire population,” Dr. Hytham Imseis said in a recent interview.
“It’s not about empowerment. It’s about control, and when you try to control any particular group and as a society try to prevent them from reproducing, I think you’ve crossed a line.”
Yet the nonprofit never lacks for donors. It has a six-figure operating budget, said Harris, who started it with only $400 but got a $25,000 check in the mail from an anonymous donor within weeks of opening.
Harris describes herself as a Christian but keeps her group nonsecular. She often sends notes and cards to women who use her service, encouraging them to stay clean.
“Many think I don’t care about these women, but it’s quite the opposite. I care enough to stop actions that I know will cause heartache,” she said.
Harris conceived of Project Prevention shortly after adopting an 8-month-old girl, Destiny, 20 years ago, when she and her husband, already parents of six biological children, lived in California.
Destiny was the daughter of a drug addict — her fifth child — and showed signs of developmental delay almost from birth. The Harrises took her in, and four months later got a call from California social services informing them that Destiny’s biological mom had given birth to a sixth baby — and could the Harrises adopt him, too?
“I didn’t want to separate Destiny from her brother, so we adopted Isaiah, too,” Harris said. “Before that, I’d never even thought about what happened to the children of drug addicts. I knew about addicts — I didn’t know about pregnant drug addicts.”
A year later, the agency called again. Would the Harrises adopt another baby from the biological mom of Destiny and Isaiah, they asked. She’d given birth again, to a girl named Taylor.
“My husband said to me then, ‘Barbara, I’m not buying a bus,’ ” Harris recalled. “The next year they called again, she’d had another baby, Brandon, and did we want him? I said yes, so we took him home.”
Destiny, pegged early on as having learning disabilities, now attends college in North Carolina and is on the dean’s list, Harris said proudly.
“They said she would be forever delayed, and that hurt me so much. I just kept nurturing her like I did my own children. In foster care she would have been passed around like a cardboard box, and she wouldn’t be who she is today. There are so many kids out there like Destiny who long to be loved,” she said.
It prompted Harris to approach a lawyer she’d met and ask if it would be legal to pay addicts to use birth control — and the answer was yes. She went out with volunteers to put up signs and fliers. Her first client, in 1998, was a drug addict who had 13 children.
“From there it just went crazy,” Harris said. “My phone didn’t stop ringing.”
Project Prevention recently expanded its program into England, paying an addicted British man to have a vasectomy. Harris plans to travel to Africa in March to launch a program that will pay HIV-positive women in Kenya $40 to have an IUD — intrauterine birth control — implanted.
“We get a lot of angry e-mails from people who don’t understand what our program is about,” said Harris. “But I get just as many e-mails and letters from women we have helped who say thank you. One woman wrote me to say that we helped her with the only responsible decision she made during her addiction.”
Kelly is one of the believers. She’s cleaned up enough to regain custody of her 2-year-old, but says the sterilization is a fail-safe.
“I can’t say for 100 percent certainty that I can stay clean — I can’t predict the future like that, so why risk it [a pregnancy] again? I’m pretty smart, but apparently not smart enough to stay off the drugs. I’m glad that this program is around,” she said.
Harris said Project Prevention gives women like Kelly a chance to exert some control over what are usually chaotic and stress-filled lives.
“People criticize my program because they think these women are zombies — just drug zombies looking for cash. But to get sterilized in the US you have to be of a certain age, you have to already have kids, you need to wait 30 days after an initial appointment, things like that.
“Yes, we offer them money and that gets their attention, but the women we help are fully committed to their decision,” Harris said.