Eenjay, that's a blog. It presents opinion without necessarily backing it up with facts.

"Barbara Harris is an American woman on a mission, to offer money to drug addicts in return for "longterm birth control" (a smushy, inaccurate term; she means sterilisation)"

But this is simply not true. Long-term birth control is just that. It takes place in cycles from 3 months to 5 years, and can be stopped any time a woman wants to (admittedly, long-term use of the contraceptive injection can mean the return of fertility is delayed for up to a year, but it is still not permanent nor irreversible). The MAJORITY of women who have participated in Barbara Harris's programme have opted for long-term contraception, ie injections, implants and IUD. This is what they have been given. Not sterilisation. A blogger saying that they are the same thing doesn't make it true.

"The ethical debate here is not whether or not it is a good idea for drug addicts not to have children, or even to act upon that, but whether it is right for someone to bribe an addict to permanently remover their ability to have children."

The blogger needs to do a bit more research, because again, she is talking about the heated and emotive issue of sterilisation, rather than the shorter-term, reversible solutions also on offer.

To know whether what is going on is truly unethical, we would need to know whether the women feel pressurised into taking the permanent solution of sterilisation. Admittedly, even offering this option is what causes the dilemma.

"It worked in America – if 3,500 people agreed to her offer, something must be not so out of order from the perspective of the addict. My guess is that when approached, the large majority of these addicts would suffer from extremely low self esteem and see themselves as a person unfit to have children – whether or not that is true, or will always be true is a whole other kettle of fish."

Again, poor research. The very statistic on Project Prevention's website showing that the 3500 American women in the programme had already borne, on average, more than 3 children each, and that almost 2/3 of those children had been given up into the care system by mothers who either felt themselves (or were deemed by the state) to be unfit to look after them, means that we are not just talking about some sort of theoretical low-self-esteem issues around the possibility of being a fit parent. We are talking about women who have proved themselves unable, for the time being, to look after a child.

"If she believed that an addict could turn things around, respond to treatment and go on to have children and stay clean (it does happen), then she would perhaps offer a less extreme form of contraception."

Well, she does - but it doesn't make nearly such exciting newspaper headlines, does it...?