Benevolent Bribery--Or Racism?

A California mom stirs debate by paying drug users to stop having kids

At the dining-room table, Isiah, an eight-year-old with a toothy grin, carefully creases paper airplanes, enlisting his mother to staple them together. "Nobody makes them as well as you," she says. Can this be the same foster baby that Barbara Harris carried home from the hospital--a stiff-limbed infant who couldn't sleep more than 15 minutes at a stretch, who would wake screaming and vomiting? "He was a bundle of nerves," recalls Harris, who adopted Isiah and three of his siblings, all born with crack cocaine in their systems. "He had the shakes. All you could do was have patience."

Yet Harris...

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