Drug addicts are people too

So, once again Protecting Our Children was on last night, and once again, I haven't watched it yet. And once again, it has sparked considerable debate amongst my fellow students.

It appears that one of the families in last night's show were chronic drug abusers who had their children removed at birth. One of my fellow students linked us to a program in the USA that sterilises drug addicts for free, and gives them money for it. She linked to this as a possible solution to the problem.

Now, I have two major issues with this. The first, as pointed out by other students, was that by offering money, people are going to sell their fertility for their next fix. Drug addiction doesn't necessarily end in premature death. Many of these sterilised addicts may recover and return to a normal life, but a life where they are unable to have children. Sterilisation, especially in women, is difficult to reverse and expensive.

My second, more significant issue is that it sees people as nothing more than their addiction. Sterilise the addicts, get rid of the problem. Or rather, ignore the problem because it's a lot easier to claim ignorance of drug addiction if there are no unhappy children needing long term care as a result of it. It also ignores that many addict parents do everything in their power to retain custody of their children. Drug addiction in itself does not automatically mean parenting failure.

So, I posed the following to the group:

The most common 'type' of people to have multiple children removed from their care are those with learning difficulties, often due to childhood abuse. Would anyone want to sterilise that particular group of people to limit the number of children in care?

If I'm playing devil's advocate, these are precisely the type of service user that should be sterilised as they are far less likely to recover or gain the correct parenting skills.

Back in the forums, the answer? Silence. Because all a sudden, we've slipped over the line into eugenics and nobody's comfortable with that.