A tough approach to drug-using mothers

It was painful to read our stories Sunday about two abused teenagers who died after spending years bouncing around Los Angeles County's child welfare system.

Times reporters Garrett Therolf and Kim Christensen chronicled the tumultuous lives of Miguel Padilla, who hanged himself at 17, and Lazhanae Harris, a 13-year-old girl found stabbed to death last spring.

The stories spotlighted ineptitude in a system charged with keeping children safe. But one passage stopped me cold, and left me angry not just at a system's failures, but also at the frailties of a family:

Lazhanae was the third of nine children of 33-year-old Shamana Johnson, a single mother who had served time in prison and had a history of substance abuse.

Johnson "was always sure she didn't want to raise her kids but never aborted any of them," Johnson's mother told reporters. "She always gave birth and made sure they were placed in safe homes."

I had to read that more than once, to make sure I understood: Johnson knew she didn't want to be a mother. Yet she had nine children, then parceled them out like puppies.

One died as a toddler and two are "unaccounted for," according to a confidential memo by the Department of Children and Family Services. And at least five wound up in foster care.

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Birth control is a difficult subject for a stranger to broach; an intrusion into a delicate area of family life. But it's become the elephant in the living room of the child welfare system. And it's time for the whispering to end.

Families with more than five children make up only 2.5% of the department's caseload. But their 1,314 kids account for 8.3% of the 15,853 children in foster homes.

Why, I wondered, can't the department add birth control to its services for troubled mothers, along with parenting classes, drug testing, vouchers for diapers and baby formula.

"It's a good thought," said the agency's director, Trish Ploehn, but against the law. "We can counsel or advise," she said. Anything more "would be stepping over our boundaries and infringing on their constitutional rights."

Or, as one social worker told me, "No matter how dismal her record of parenting, you can't go over to a woman and say, 'You're not going to be a fit mother, so we're going to take that right away from you.' "

To that, Barbara Harris says: Why not?

Harris and her husband had three sons when they became foster parents in 1990 to an 8-month-old girl born to a crack addict who had

already lost four children to foster care.

A few months later, a social worker asked them to take the baby's newborn brother. Over the next few years, they would adopt four siblings from that same woman.

For Harris, it became a personal issue. And she responded in 1994 with what some considered an outlandish offer: She would pay drug-abusing women $200 to be sterilized.

"Because when they're using drugs, they don't care about the consequences of anything," she told me in a phone interview this week. "The only thing that makes sense is to stop these women from having babies."

Harris -- who lived in Orange County then and now resides with her family in North Carolina -- was castigated by civil rights groups, accused of coercing vulnerable women to sign away their reproductive rights.