BIRTH CONTROL, YES; PEOPLE CONTROL, NO

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, January 22, 1993                   TAG: 9301220419
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
BIRTH CONTROL, YES; PEOPLE CONTROL, NO
WHEN A STATE advocates birth control, especially when the targets (or beneficiaries) are the poor, critics call it social engineering. Supporters say it's a way to break the cycle of poverty. There is truth, and danger, in both claims - particularly when a state proposes to distribute the birth control.
Norplant, a breakthrough in reproductive medicine, has revived this debate. Six matchstick-size capsules, surgically placed beneath the skin of a woman's arm, can prevent pregnancy for five years. The inserts are easily removed, restoring fertility.
Norplant is no different, in principle, from other forms of birth control now freely available to low-income Americans. Clearly, it can help poor women who have the least access to affordable, effective birth control.
But caution is required. For example, one of the latest notions of social reform through birth control - by singling out welfare recipients and ex-prisoners - could too easily become a tool of social coercion.
Last week, Maryland Gov. William Schaefer floated a proposal to offer free Norplant contraceptives to women on welfare and vasectomies to men released from prisons. Schaefer said he wouldn't rule out making such measures mandatory in some instances, though he did not say what those instances would be.
The plan is radical, he admits, and some people may see it as racist. But those who are poor are already overburdened and need help.
What Schaefer says is true. But the issue, laden with emotion and suspicion, begs for a bit of perspective.
In the first place, welfare is not a huge budget item, nor is it for all recipients a form of permanent and intergenerational dependency. It makes up only a small fraction of most states' budgets. Most women on welfare now have been receiving aid for less than two years.
And families on welfare are just as capable of reproductive restraint as families not on welfare. In Virginia, 75 percent of recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children have only one or two children.
In the second place, ex-prisoners are often released under auspices of parole or probation that perpetuate a degree of control over their lives. Schaefer's vasectomy idea, to his credit, avoids the implication that only women are responsible for preventing unwanted pregnancies. But free choice and informed consent are questionable when prisoners are involved, still murky when they are ex-prisoners.
Also, vasectomies are not easily reversed. Why a permanent "solution"? A hint of the old myth of a crime gene lurks in the recommendation that ex-prisoners be offered vasectomies, as if to avoid the propagation of criminals.
All of which is to say that if a state birth-control initiative is to help poor people gain control of their lives without impinging on their rights or dignity, it must be managed carefully. This means, among other things:

Birth control is a good option for everyone, not just poor people. A state's unseemly preoccupation with birth control for the poor is demeaning, racist if it implicitly sets as a desirable goal the reduction of the black population.

Don't even think about mandatory birth control. It's an invasion of privacy. That this option is even being considered by a state's governor ought to arouse concern.

Don't pay people to use birth control. Paying would be cost-effective for the state. And offering Norplant or vasectomies free amounts to a state subsidy. But paying poor people not to conceive is too strong an inducement among unequal partners, too great a threat to freedom and dignity.

Offer free access to birth control not just to welfare recipients and ex-prisoners, but to all poor women and men with below-poverty incomes.
As Elijah Cummings, a state senator from Baltimore, told The New York Times: "The state has something hanging over these people. With welfare mothers it's money, it's benefits. With prisoners, it's freedom."
A state that intends to help the poor must look beyond its welfare rolls and its prisons, beyond those most dependent on and obligated to the state.
Broadening the benefit would avoid adding another source of assistance that low-income people lose by going to work. And it might reassure opponents that state-provided birth control is not just another way to control the very people who want and need to be more independent.
The poor should not be asked to trade their fertility for money or freedom.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB