For the last 20 years Barbara Harris has driven across the country in a branded RV, advertising her nonprofit to drug addicts and alcoholics. Her organization, Project Prevention, pays substanceabusers $300 to get sterilized or put on longterm birth control like the implant, or an IUD. To date, she has paid over 7,000 people, mostly women, to give up their fertility.

By using cash incentives, she feels like she is stopping a problem in it’s tracks. “We're preventing women who are strung out on drugs and alcohol from conceiving a child,” Harris says, “Nobody has a right to force feed any child drugs and then deliver a child that may die or may have lifelong illnesses.”

It seems straightforward enough but the ethical questions behind Harris program are not. Vice News Tonight caught up with Barbara Harris during her first RV road trip of the summer, where she targets areas where addicts or those who know them hang out and speaks to longtime critics who think Project Prevention may be contributing to the very problems Harris set out to solve two decades ago.


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