Kiwiblog

Dita De Boni writes in the Herald:

Act’s David Garrett is long gone from the headlines but his idea about sterilising child abusers was echoed in an interview on Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report this week.

Barbara Harris runs a US charity called Project Prevention, in which drug and alcohol abusers receive payments to put themselves on long term contraception or offer themselves up for sterilisation.

Barbara began this charity at her home in North Carolina after giving birth to six of her own boys and longing for a little girl.

She ended up adopting the little girl of a crack addict, and then, when that addict gave birth to a child each year for the next three years, Barbara took all the siblings.

She and her family lived through the nightmare of caring for children born to addicts and having to watch as the tiny babies struggled to free themselves of their mother’s narcotic of choice.

So someone who walked the walk when it came to helping families.

Project Prevention has paid some 3500 women and men to stop having children, with IUDs the most common contraceptive option for these addicts.

The charity has just moved into the UK, and is looking to extend its reach to Africa and the Caribbean.

It was hard to see any kind of downside to this excellent work, although RNZ’s excellent Katherine Ryan did her best in offering a countering view that down-and-outers should not be bribed to stop breeding.

Needless to say, it wasn’t a convincing counter argument.

Each woman that comes to Project Prevention in the US has already a huge number of pregnancies behind her – some aborted or miscarried, some ‘successful’.

Each has left a trail of destruction in her wake, for herself and her child.

Some, according to Barbara, have no idea they are pregnant until they go into labour. What a disaster.

Perhaps New Zealand doesn’t quite have the narcotics problem that the US has but we do have hopeless cases creating and having children all the time.

By implementing this system, for the small cost of a couple of hundred dollars a year, we can potentially curtail the much larger cost to society down the track.

Please come to New Zealand Barbara. We can offer you plenty of work – and the help of a like-minded, ex-politician who was ridiculed for holding a similar common sense view to your own.

I’d donate to it. Prevention is better than cure.

The NZ Herald talks charity:

At the heart of John Key’s approach are the concepts that the Government should not be providing everything in social welfare, that, indeed, it may not be the best judge of what is needed, and that charity is a good thing. He has sought to further these ideas by building on work done by the previous Government, most notably in abolishing the $1890 cap on rebates for charitable donations.

Most recently, legislation has provided for that rebate to be received automatically by wage and salary earners who donate directly to an approved charity from their pay cheque.

Yet such measures amount only to tinkering when compared with the extremely enticing tax breaks that underpin the strong tradition of private charity in the US.

The Dominion Post weighs in to the sterilisation debate:

ACT list MP David Garrett should know by now that, when he thinks aloud, he will almost certainly find himself in trouble.

Like Maori Party bad boy Hone Harawira, he shoots from the lip, and his homespun philosophy is rarely politically correct.

But despite both MPs’ comments ritually provoking outrage, a kernel of truth is often found therein.

Last week, Mr Garrett was in hot water again, this time for daring to suggest that parents who have abused their children be offered $5000 to get themselves sterilised. …

Predictably, Mr Garrett’s comments were compared with the excesses of Nazi Germany. Mr Kahui’s lawyer, Lorraine Smith, called them “outrageous and a disgrace”.

Karl du Fresne blogs on how hysterical some of the reaction was, with the Nazi comparisons.

Back to the Dom Post:

But those who lambast Mr Garrett for initiating an idea that at least attempts to confront the issue need to face an unpalatable fact: programmes in place now to protect vulnerable children are failing. Sixteen children died last year as a result of family violence.

Delcelia Witika, Lillybing, James Whakaruru, Nia Glassie, Chris and Cru Kahui comprise just a handful of the names on New Zealand’s roll of shame, each one killed by people whose responsibility it was to care for them.

And people who knew these little ones were being abused did not intervene. It is not good enough.

There is no doubt that the Garrett proposal is a step too far. However, even his most vehement critics should find an initiative instigated by Social Development Minister Paula Bennett more acceptable.

Last week, an Experts Forum on Child Abuse recommended that state agencies be able to keep track of parents whose children had died, or been taken off them.

The problem is that, at present, files are closed when a child dies, and social workers don’t know another child has been born to the same mother until that child, too, comes to their notice through abuse or, worse, because he or she has died.

I’m amazed we do not already do this.

It is no wonder Mr Garrett is casting around for new ideas. The old ones aren’t working.

And that is why his comments, on this blog, sparked a national conversation.

And the ODT looks at government spending restraint:

It makes sense for governments to regularly review the costs of administration and services and, especially, to look for efficiencies in operating and technology costs.

Some $2 billion is required to be found in the next two years for the latter, which in turn it is hoped should lead to less duplication of office support functions and services.

It is telling that Mr Key has cited last year’s health sector reforms, which pooled district health board payroll and procurement, with estimated savings over five years of $700 million – and the loss of 500 jobs.

The Government does not consider what is planned to be on the scale of the radical reforms of the Rogernomics era, yet it has declined to make public estimates of potential job losses, which rather implies that the reforms will be sufficiently substantial to be job-costly, and the public service unions have not been slow to express their anguish.

The recession knocked $50 billion out of the economy – the public sector can’t be immune from that.

Bloody Jadis. I turn my back for a few hours and she does a post on sterilisiation of child abusers after listening to Michael Laws on Radio Live. David Garrett comments, and suddenly it is in the newspapers, on Morning Report and all over the blogosphere.

I suppose time to add my own 2c to the debate:

1. Absolutely against any compulsory sterilisation. Apart from the fact no surgeon will operate on a non consenting patient, the state should not have the power to remove someone’s fertility.
2. Not supportive of the proposal to pay child abusers to get sterilised, as it will only target poor child abusers, and may be thin end of wedge.
3. However am open to having a debate on whether one could have it as an early release incentive for people who have been convicted of child abuse and actually gone to prison.

One of the reasons we send people to prison is to protect the community. If someone is sentenced to three years jail for child abuse, then is the community better protected by having them come out at 2.5 years and unable to have more children, or at three years and likely to have more children, whom will grow up abused, and in turn probably becomes abusers themselves.

By not having a monetary incentive, it removes the potential problems of being more attractive to poor child abusers.

Also by limiting it to people in prison, and convicted of child abuse, it means you target the worse of the worse.

I’m sure there are strong arguments against such a policy also, and I am not saying I support it without question. But unless one just wants to wring your hands about the child abuse problem, it may be a more palatable option than monetary incentives which I would not support.

The Dom Post reports:

Wanganui Mayor Michael Laws says giving the “underclass” money to be sterilised will address our child abuse problem.

Critics last night labelled the suggestion “totalitarian”, “draconian” and “reprehensible”, and questioned his appropriateness as a city leader.

Mr Laws said the children of beneficiaries, drug addicts and criminals had little chance in life. He offered his observations after he was approached for comment on the death of two-year-old Wanganui boy Karl Perigo-Check, the son of a convicted murderer and gang member.

“If we gave $10,000 to certain people and said ‘we’ll voluntarily sterilise you’ then all of society would be better off. There’d be less dead children and less social problems.

It is a fact there are some people who are not fit to be parents. And when they do have more children, the kids get removed from them at birth. I’m not sure how many are in this category, but there are a few.

I doubt anyone sensible advocates compulsory sterilisation. No state should ever have that power. Even the thought makes me shudder.

But if a parent has a history of child abuse (for example), should there be an incentive for him or her to get sterilised – such as a cash payment as Laws suggests?

Personally I don’t think it is a good idea. For one thing people can end up as parents, even if sterilised. They partner up with someone who had kids for example.

But also it is still pretty creepy to have our own version of China’s toasters for sterilisation policy. Now sure China was aimed at everyone – to keep overall population down. But I don’t think bribing our own citizens to get sterilised if a great innovation.

Also many sterilisations can be reversed anyway.

But Laws is right that something needs to be done. He hasn’t got the solution, but the status quo is not acceptable.