When it’s right to stop women having children
January 28 2017, 12:01am, The Times
Janice Turner
Persuading the vulnerable not to have babies might smack of eugenics but the alternative is seeing them taken into care
Lisa’s sons were taken into care aged seven and two. She understood they were at risk from her violent partner, but that didn’t assuage her loss. So she turned to heroin, ended up homeless and, to fill her boys’ place, had another baby, then another. Both were removed days after birth; their only traces are names tattooed on Lisa’s wrist.
She would have continued having and losing babies. Men, she notes, are nicer when you’re pregnant, don’t hit you so much. And social workers look after you, say that if you’re good, stay clean, maybe you can keep this one. White lies. And once they’ve got the baby, “they throw you in a ditch”.
Instead Lisa was offered a deal: have a contraceptive implant, put your fertility on hold for 18 months, and receive help — intense therapy for mental illness, advice on housing and finding a job. But most importantly you will have a counsellor. Lesley has helped Lisa excavate all the childhood horrors she has kept hidden and she describes her as “my mum”.
But the charity Pause, which runs the project, has been criticised for imposing this fertility condition. Social work academics have suggested it compromises human rights and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service has said it “undermines the autonomy of a group of women who already have little control over their lives”.
Yet Pause’s founder, Sophie Humphreys, is adamant control is what she is returning to these women. As a Hackney social worker she removed baby after baby from the same few mothers. The trauma of loss was unbearable, yet they were pregnant again next year. A cycle needed to be broken and this, she says, is no different to requiring drug addicts to quit before entering rehab.
And Pause works. In three years – in seven pilot schemes including Doncaster and Hull — it has helped 137 women who between them had 497 children taken into care. If they’d continued giving birth at the same rate, they’d have had 27 babies a year removed, at a cost of £1.5 million. No wonder the Department for Education has showered Pause with £6.8 million to open 43 more practices. If every woman in England who had had two or more children removed could work with Pause, it estimates, more than £2.5 billion could be saved over five years. And then there is the unquantifiable suffering of broken lives.
Between them, 137 women had 497 children put in care
This is, however, tricky ethical territory for the reproductive rights movement. Are we rescuing vulnerable women from their runaway biological train or echoing eugenicists who wanted the lower orders to stop breeding? Marie Stopes believed “unfit” mothers including “the inferior, the depraved, and the feeble-minded” should be sterilised. The US contraceptive pioneer Margaret Sanger had similar views, but then in the 1920s, working among the poor of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, she’d witnessed women die from repeated pregnancies, their babies in pitiful health, yet offered no help beyond advice to avoid a husband’s urges by sleeping on the roof.
Now contraceptives allow most British women to take family planning for granted. So why can’t these “feckless” mothers stop having babies for the state to raise? Our age puts such a premium on control. So it is hard to imagine how people born into chaos feel they have no power to shape their lives.
Lisa was neglected by her own mother who had been raised in care too. A wheel of misery spun through three generations. So why did no one stop to ask: if you never had a mother, how can you know how to be one? Listening to Pause women at a London event, it was clear no one had noticed when they were hungry, bunked off school, were sexually abused, slept with bad men, took drugs. No one ever believed they were worth a damn.
If you never had a mother, how can you know how to be one?
One speaker was the oldest of nine children: her mother had babies, one after the other, until neighbours reported the children begging for food and a fleet of council vehicles took all of them away except her. Yet even then, every year or so, her mother had another baby, who was immediately adopted. “Why don’t you use a condom, Mum?” she’d ask. The man didn’t like wearing one, she’d reply, and who was she to stifle his pleasure, whatever the consequences for her.
This woman wonders what a fertility moratorium would have done for her mother, who didn’t speak about her own childhood, who never, amid all these lost babies, ever cried.
Because once such women cannot get pregnant, their baby hunger is put temporarily aside and they regain power over the rest of their lives. Pause clients are among our most damaged citizens — 98 per cent with an addiction, half with mental health problems, 70 per cent victims of domestic violence — and yet a majority end up after 18 months in education or a job. Many too had resumed some contact with the children they’d lost. It is the starkest reminder that reproductive rights underpin all other freedoms women enjoy.
In Britain, 13,000 children are taken into care every year. Numbers are growing as interventions in troubled families are carried out earlier. Is it hard-headed eugenics to try to prevent them from being born? I ask Lisa if she will keep her contraceptive implant when the 18 months are up. She smiles, this woman who until this week had never been to London, or stayed in a hotel, or been on a train: “Yes, for three years at least: there are lots of things I’d like to do.”
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