Motherin the Middle

To get to the neighborhood where Barbara Harris and her husband, Smitty, have lived for nearly 20 years, you drive down Orange County’s Beach Boulevard, passing trailer parks, motels and Knott’s Berry Farm. Turn right at a liquor store in Stanton and you’ll find a quiet community where some people live the most stable of lives and others come and go, their children moving into and out of the local elementary school as frequently as Barbara did when she was growing up, before she settled down in one house, with one man, forever.

You would never think, on meeting this husky woman with sandy hair tied back in a scarf, on accepting her offer of a tuna melt and a Coke, that she stirs people to the level of livid, twitching outrage usually vented on the world’s Limbaughs and Hillarys. But then you would never peg Harris as someone who could get so worked up about an issue that she’d race around the nation putting up blunt message billboards. You’d never expect to see this friendly woman with a penchant for oversized shirts appearing on “Oprah” or in the pages of Time, calmly shrugging off the anger she engenders.

Given the story of her life, even Harris has a hard time picturing herself at the center of the sort of scene that unfolded last year in Oakland, beneath a billboard offering $200 to any crack-addicted woman who would get her tubes tied or go on long-term birth control. Yet there she stood, surrounded by angry, mostly African American women who, according to witnesses, heckled her as if she were a Klan grand wizard threatening to murder the black child she was embracing. “Where did you get that one?” one woman shouted, pointing to Harris’ adopted son, Isiah. “Rent-a-kid?”

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There is one thing that Barbara Strother Harris has always known about herself: She was born to be a mother. Her dream was to have 10 children. She wanted to nurture them and keep them in school. She wanted to go to PTA meetings and school plays. She wanted to live in one place. It was not what her own parents had wanted. But Barbara wanted it very much.

Harris was born in 1952 in Lancaster, Pa., the second child of her father’s second family. She thinks her parents grew up somewhere around there, near the Amish country. They moved to Tampa when Barbara was a baby, and then to Wilmington, Del. A year or two later, around the time that Barbara turned 5, they wound up in Las Vegas, where her father, Albert Strother, worked for a while as a card dealer. Ruth Strother, Barbara’s mother, sold tickets at an amusement park. By the time Barbara was in high school, the Strothers had moved their four children and Joanne Ramanna, one of Albert’s daughters from his first marriage, seven more times: to Stanton and Anaheim in Orange County; to Littleton, Denver and Colorado Springs in Colorado; to Ohio, and back to California. Wherever they went, Albert picked up a new job. For a while, he drove an ice cream truck. Then he worked as a restaurant manager. When Barbara turned 13 years old, she pretended to be 16 and worked in the restaurants that Albert ran.

Once, while the family was living in Florida, a man knocked on their apartment door. Apparently responding to Albert Strother’s dark hair and olive skin, he announced that “Mexicans” were supposed to be living on the other side of town. Despite the doubts of some in his family, Albert considered himself white and was always saying bad things about blacks and Mexicans. The visitor’s comment festered in his mind for years, Harris says. “Can you imagine somebody coming over and telling you that you belong on the other side of town?” she asks. “Although I don’t mind it happening to my father because he deserved it. . . . It was kind of a taste of his own medicine.”

Most of the time, even when the family was living in a motel in Colorado, the kids went to school. But neither Albert nor Ruth had finished high school, and they viewed work as a higher calling than sitting around a classroom, killing time until you were old enough to quit or get married. In the 10th grade at Magnolia High School in Anaheim, Barbara decided she was educated. “I could never communicate very well with my parents, so I wrote them a note. I told them I wanted to quit school and work full time. They said, ‘fine.’ ” She got a job waiting tables at the International House of Pancakes in Buena Park. The next time the Strothers moved, Barbara didn’t.

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While Barbara was growing up on the road, Smitty Harris lived in one single, solid, stable place: High Point, N.C. “Same place,” Smitty says. “Same city. Same friends.” He had separated from his first wife and was working in Southern California as a surgical assistant, a guy who hands doctors scalpels, when he met Barbara on a blind date. It was 1979, and by then Barbara had a son, Stephen, whom she was raising on her own. She had been 19 when she got pregnant, and her parents had already moved to Pennsylvania. They were not happy that Stephen’s father was African American. “If you keep that child,” they told her, “don’t think you can come to live with us.” So Barbara put the baby up for adoption. But she couldn’t stand the idea of giving away her child. She called the county and got him back. Then she called her mother. “I’m keeping my baby,” she said. “Can I come home?” It was all right, Ruth said finally, as long as Barbara didn’t tell anyone that the baby’s father was black. “She said I could only come back if I told everyone that he was Mexican. She used to slick his hair back with baby oil and call him her ‘little taco.’ ”

As Stephen got bigger, Barbara started to date. “For a while I dated white men, but they would be mean to my son, and it always got to the point where they would call me a ‘nigger lover.’ When my son was 3, I decided to date black men again because if I didn’t, my son would literally be the black sheep of the family.”

She was 27 years old and working at the IHOP in Santa Ana when she met Smitty. Three years later, they were married. Thinking back on her childhood, Harris saw that she had a generational pattern to break, the family habit of perpetual motion, of living on the fringes. “We weren’t abused kids, and my parents weren’t alcoholic or drug addicts.” But still, she says, “It wasn’t the life I would want for my kids.”

She and Smitty settled in Stanton, in the same community where Barbara’s parents had lived during a couple of their swings through California. He got a job at a hospital in Santa Ana and she stayed at IHOP. Their son Brian was born in 1980, followed by Rodney in 1981. Seeking a realm where their children would be accepted, they founded a club for interracial families. The group got together for picnics and holiday celebrations; the parents chatted while the children played. “It’s the place you go,” Brian used to say, “where you feel like you fit in.”

Barbara loved taking the boys to soccer and basketball practice and helping them with their homework. She was determined that they would break out of the family cycle of rootlessness. Her boys would go to college. They would have other chances. Stability. After Rodney was born, she figured three children were enough and had a tubal ligation. But she found herself aching for a little girl. So she and Smitty decided to take in a foster child. The first girl who came to live with them was a teenager. She only stayed a year.

Then, in the summer of 1990, the social worker called back. There was a baby. She was 8 months old, and she had no name. She was behind in her development. The social services people called her “Baby Girl.” She had been born addicted to crack cocaine and would, like many “crack babies,” be prone to poor motor development, learning disabilities and serious physical ailments. Her mother had four other children, all in foster care. This one needed a home. Barbara figured that she would curl the little girl’s hair and coo over her and then, after a while, someone would adopt her or her mother would get off drugs and want her back. “I thought I wouldn’t be able to love her because she wasn’t mine,” Barbara says. “But after 24 hours, she was mine.” She named the baby Destiny.

Four months later, the social worker phoned again. There was another baby. When Isiah, named by Brian and Rodney after basketball player Isiah Thomas, came home, Barbara quit her job at IHOP. She made baby books for the two new children. She took Destiny, who the social workers predicted would always be behind the developmental curve, to therapy and worked with her all day long, stimulating her mind and settling her nerves.

“When you’re a foster parent, you become involved with the social workers and the foster program,” says Barbara’s older half-sister, Joanne, who lives just a few houses away from the Harrises. “When we went to these functions, we would see it. The children in wheelchairs. The children with problems because of drug and alcohol addiction.” Joanne says that until Barbara started going to those meetings, she had had no idea that the crack epidemic was producing such a tragic legacy.

When the county called again, to say that Destiny and Isiah’s mother had another baby, Taylor, also addicted to crack, Barbara said yes, she’d take her. And she said yes again a year later when they came to her about Brandon. Same birth mother.

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The Harrises adopted all four children. They worked with Destiny to overcome her developmental delays; they learned how to calm Taylor, whose moods and attention were affected by prenatal drug exposure and neglect; and they tried especially hard to rid Brandon of difficulty with coordination and poor muscle tone. Once, when adoption worker Chedgzsey Smith was visiting the family, Brandon came running out of his bedroom, crying out jubilantly, “I did it! I did it!” The adults rushed to his room, where it turned out that Brandon indeed had succeeded in hitting a ball with a bat--a major advance for a child with hand-eye coordination problems. But the feat took place indoors, and the ball went right through a window. “Barbara just stared at me,” recalls Smith, a specialist in trans-racial families who handled all four adoptions. “I said, ‘Well, he did it!’ ”

The Harrises held a birthday party each year that embraced the birth mother’s four other children, relighting the candles on the cake for each child. And Barbara, whose ambitions had never reached beyond IHOP, found that she was so angry, so worried, so obsessed, so frantic about the whole crack baby dilemma--of children trapped in far worse circumstances than her own childhood’s rootless wandering--that she decided she had to make it stop.

So she called the Anaheim police. And then the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. Could addicts be arrested on child abuse charges for giving birth to four or five or, like the mother of her own adopted children, eight babies addicted to drugs? “I asked if I could do something to the mother of my kids,” she says.

“Sorry,” came the response. Giving birth to drug-addicted babies is not a crime. Well then, Harris decided, there ought to be a law. “I started writing letters to everyone I could think of--the governor, senators, Assembly people--telling them I thought something should be done about the problem.”

Two years earlier, Brian had written a letter to ABC’s “Home Show,” proposing a cross-racial pen pal club: “I am 12 years old,” he wrote. “And I have been interested in race relations since I was 7.” Family members say that responses to Brian’s plea reached 20,000. Recalling that lesson in media impact, Harris went on “Leeza,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and local TV programs. Her idea: Make hospitals test babies for drugs, and if they test positive, offer the mothers a choice between going on long-term birth control or going to jail. Harris found a supporter in former Assembly member Phil Hawkins, a Republican from Bellflower. He wrote a bill to create the crime of “prenatal child neglect” and submitted it for the 1996 legislative session. His press conference catapulted Harris onto the talk-show circuit. But the bill died just before it reached the Assembly floor. Harris figured it would be introduced again in the next session, but late in 1996, Hawkins quit the Assembly. “The L.A. Times did a story and I went on ‘Oprah,’ and that was the end of that,” Harris says. “The people in Sacramento never did get in touch with me. And then I found out Hawkins wasn’t even in office anymore.”

On “Oprah,” Harris had appeared alongside one woman who had been an addict but had turned her life around, and another who was pregnant and still addicted. On the way back to the hotel, she had asked her pregnant co-panelist “what would it take to get these addicts to go on birth control?”

The woman’s response: “Give ‘em 20 bucks.”

A few months later, Harris sat thinking. Her bill had evaporated and no one, not the police, not the D.A., not the Legislature, no one but right- wing politicos and talk-show hosts wanted to do a damn thing. Then she remembered the addict’s words. She talked it over with Smitty. What if instead of just birth control, they also offered to pay women who agreed to be sterilized? Then they wouldn’t have to keep taking the pills or getting Norplant contraceptive implants. How much would that be worth? Twenty dollars was too little. But $200--that was a lot of money. They asked Robert Pugsley, a professor at Southwestern University School of Law who had made contact after hearing Harris on the radio, to research whether their budding plan was legal. He set some student research assistants to the task. Soon he phoned Harris. As long as care was taken to ensure that the cash-for-birth control deal was strictly voluntary, the scheme was legal, he said. Pugsley made some recommendations: Don’t accept any government money, so it doesn’t seem like the government is coercing women to get sterilized. Don’t hire doctors, or pay for the procedure, so there’s no self-interest on the part of any physician to recommend a tubal ligation or even the long-term birth control. “Whether it’s the short-term birth control methods or the permanent one of sterilization, it’s an extraordinarily major life decision,” says Pugsley. “We wanted to be sure that the woman who was making this decision had been fully apprised of her rights and what she was giving up.”

To Harris, the women would be giving up not rights but unwitting participation in an epidemic of prenatal drug exposure and neglect. Since the media first hyped the issue in the 1980s, the questions of just how many infants are born with cocaine in their veins and how badly they are likely to suffer have been hotly debated. In 1992 and 1993, studies showed that about 221,000 children were exposed each year to illegal drugs in the womb. A recent study at Brown University found that as many as 80,550 children per year nationally now need special education services as a result of prenatal exposure to crack cocaine specifically. The annual cost: $352 million. And then there was the crushing strain that such babies put on the nation’s foster-care system.

And so one day in 1997, Harris sat down at the family’s computer and typed out these words: “Get Birth Control. Get Cash.” And then she typed her phone number. She made the typeface really large and printed out a stack. She and Smitty decided on a sliding scale. They would pay $50 for an injection of the contraceptive Depo-Provera, $100 for Norplant and $200 for a tubal ligation. The women would have to get the procedure themselves--typically paid for by Medicaid--and then bring a statement from the doctor saying that the procedure had been performed.

An attorney who had heard Harris on the radio donated $400. The couple were ready. “I thought, well, now I have enough to pay two women,” Harris says. Accompanied by supporters and a little blind girl who’d been born to a drug-addicted woman, Harris drove up to MacArthur Park in Los Angeles and stuck the flyers up on trees and telephone poles. Within the week, she had her first response. “I ran around the house screaming after I got off the phone with her,” she says. “She’d had six or eight kids, and she said she was going to get a tubal ligation.” The same day, the phone rang again. This time it was a woman who had read about Harris in the Orange County Register. Her sister, the woman said, was a heroin addict with several children. Harris called her. The two women had their tubes tied on the same day.

With the assistance of supporters who knew how to do such things, Harris set up her organization as a not-for-profit corporation. She gave it the acronym CRACK, for Children Requiring A Caring Kommunity. Barbara was the executive director, Smitty the treasurer, and sister Joanne a board member. Pugsley joined the advisory board.

Donations rolled in. Laura Schlessinger, the controversial radio talk show host, gave $10,000. Arch-conservative Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife funded a grant through his Aleghenny fund. Harris went to Scaife’s office to pick up the money. She hadn’t realized how rich he was. His politics? She didn’t give a hoot. The crusade had begun.

Sharon Adams Burris was pregnant for the 14th time when she found out about Harris. With her 13 younger children all in foster care, Burris was trying hard to stay clean during this pregnancy so she could keep just one of her babies at home with her. But “the addiction got worse and worse each time with each baby,” Burris says. “I would constantly crave it just like I was craving food or something.” A nurse at Martin Luther King/Charles Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles told Burris about this woman in Orange County who was giving cash incentives to addicts. When Kendall (who is now 2, and living at home) was born, Burris had her tubes tied--and received $200 from Harris. It was, she says, the right thing to do, money or no. But the reward was what got her attention.

“I had them tied,” Burris says, “because just in case I relapsed, I didn’t want to have another baby to go back into the [foster care] system.” As of April 25, Harris had provided cash to about 200 women and one man, who was paid $200 for getting a vasectomy. Of the women, 106 had tubal ligations, 25 opted for Norplants, 47 took Depo-Provera treatments and 21 were fitted with IUDs. According to the organization’s Web site, the client base is racially mixed: 84 white, 84 African American, 24 Hispanic, 3 Native American, and 6 biracial.

The organization’s tax returns for 1998 and 1999 report that Harris, the only full-time worker, is paid $300 a week, and two part- time secretaries each earn less than $1,000 per year. Everyone else volunteers.

“It’s good work,”says Smitty of his wife’s mission. “It’s honest work.”

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Which brings us back to that scene under the billboard--in Oakland or in any of the cities -- Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, Las Vegas, Houston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Francisco and Fresno--where CRACK has opened an office in the past year.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an African American activist who heads an L.A.-based group called the National Alliance for Positive Action, was driving down the street in a predominantly black part of Los Angeles when he looked up and saw one of Barbara’s signs. It had a graphic picture of a baby hooked up to an intensive- care incubator and the words “sterilization” and “crack” in big letters. It offered cash. It said the name of the accompanying Web site was www.cracksterilization.com. It offended him.

“Sterilization always conjures up for me the eugenics movement, where undesirables, the poor, downtrodden, people who are considered on the fringe, [are sterilized] to make sure they don’t reproduce,” Hutchinson says. “All those things came into my mind.” Hutchinson and other activists quickly called a press conference. They denounced the billboard, wondering out loud why it had been placed in a minority neighborhood. Hutchison wrote an angry column about it for a community newspaper. He received a flood of e-mails from Harris, telling him about her life and explaining her motivations. She said billboard companies produce such signs at a discounted charity rate and post them wherever they have available space, be it Watts or Beverly Hills. Hutchinson softened. But he still thinks that offering cash for sterilization is wrong.

In response to such criticism, Harris has decided to put more emphasis on the birth control aspects of her program and she has taken the baby picture off the billboards. She has gradually toned down her gut-reaction rhetoric and no longer accuses addicted mothers of producing “litters.” She has decided to pay $200 no matter what form of birth control participants choose, so no one can say that an addict is opting for sterilization just to get more money. On the advice of a donor in liberal Minnesota, she has created a second Web address, www.cashforbirthcontrol.com, for those who might be too squeamish to respond to a billboard advertising www.cracksterilization.com.

Still, the outrage continues.

“I have not met Mrs. Harris,” says Gene Collins, president of the NAACP chapter in Las Vegas, which protested when billboards went up there. “But how can you come in and say that you are concerned with the welfare of the mother when here’s a person who is not of sound mind, who has been addicted to drugs, and [then is told], ‘OK, we’re going to give you $200 to become sterile and you can take the $200 and go out and buy yourself some more crack’?”

Rocio Cordoba, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who has frequently criticized CRACK, says, “The choice of whether a woman decides to have another child is a very private decision, that should be made according to that woman’s personal circumstance and her moral beliefs. Even if every single person who participated in the CRACK program had 14 children, is it appropriate for a third party, a private party, to pay them not to have more children?”

Last month, a sign company took down the group’s billboards in Kansas City after a story by the Kansas City Star prompted complaints. At the same time, though, Harris’ group put up a new billboard in Dallas. She says she invited both Planned Parenthood, which has opposed her activity on the grounds that she is pressuring women to give up reproductive rights, and the NAACP, which has questioned her campaign’s placement of the billboards in minority neighbors, to the billboard’s unveiling. Neither group showed.

But two women did phone after seeing CRACK’S number on the sign. As Harris tells it, one was 41/2 months pregnant, the other 21/2 months pregnant. They wanted to have abortions and they wanted Harris to pay for them. After that, they promised to take her up on her birth control offer.

Harris refused. She told the women that she is about responsibility, about babies. Having an abortion, she told them, is as irresponsible as using drugs. “I said, ‘Do you realize that there’s a baby inside you?’ ”

One of the women insisted she would find a way to abort whether Harris paid for it or not. The other said that if she could get off drugs, she would carry the pregnancy to term. So Harris got on the phone and found a drug treatment program in Dallas that works specifically with mothers and their children. She gave the woman the number and promised to keep in touch. Days later the first woman called back--she too would continue the pregnancy and go into treatment.

Many on the crack baby battlefront say that, frustration aside, drug treatment for mothers is the reasonable, compassionate approach. “Sometimes I wonder myself when I see a mom coming in and this is her fifth baby or sixth baby and the children are all in [government] custody,” says Mildred Jamison, who runs a group home for children with prenatal drug exposure in St. Louis. “And I think, why can’t we keep this woman from having more children?”

The answer, says Jamison, is that to do so would be just plain wrong. “It’s like purchasing babies . . . $200 is a lot of money to a drug addict.” Instead, the former foster-care inspector wants to build a training center for birth mothers at Faith House, her 50-bed facility. The mothers would visit their children there and bit by bit learn how to be parents. “We would teach them how to comb the children’s hair, how to bathe them and cook for them,” Jamison says. “They’re not stoned every minute of the day. They will sober up enough to talk to you.”

Harris says she admires such programs and the hope they offer troubled moms. But for her, these approaches are off the mark--as is the rage of people who accuse her of victimizing addicted mothers. Because Harris is about babies--wholly, purely, simply about babies.

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Sharon Bernstein is a staff writer in The Times’ Business section.