Faced with drastic problems, it's always tempting to use drastic measures. And the extreme case of the Oakland County cocaine abuser whose 13th child was born with severe developmental disabilities, and is being kept alive only by machines, is inspiring renewed talk of drug-testing pregnant women, punishing them for passing drugs to their fetus, and sterilization. But although drug addicts are generally incapable of caring for children and should not have them while they're addicted, giving into the temptation to legislate who can have kids is disastrous. In 1942, when the U.S. Supreme Court said the government couldn't sterilize repeat felons, Nazi Germany was performing wholesale sterilizations on people it deemed unfit to have children.
People still shudder at the horror.
As much as everyone wants babies to be healthy, the ability to bear children is not given by government, and government doesn't have the right to take it away. If addicts do not voluntarily use birth control and severely neglect their children, then the government can step in and terminate parental rights, as a judge may well do in the Oakland County case. But government has no place deciding who should and should not have children. History shows this solution has potentially cataclysmic results.