Thomas Sutcliffe: Should the unborn have rights too?

Social Studies: Project Prevention is about preventing children being born to drug addicts

It's startling how powerful unborn children can be. And when I say "unborn children" I don't mean foetuses (who have a vociferous and effective lobby of their own) but children who don't exist in any form at all as yet, and – should the ambitions of their champions be achieved – won't ever exist.

It sounds a bit odd that sentence, doesn't it? In what strange universe can you defend the notional rights of notional beings by taking steps to ensure that they never become actual? Well, this universe, as it happens – since that's just another way of describing Barbara Harris's Project Prevention, a charity which offers drug addicts cash incentives to undergo sterilisation. Project Prevention isn't about preventing drug addiction, it's about preventing children being born to drug addicts – and just last month a 38-year-old man became its first British client – surrendering his ability to procreate in return for a mere £200.

It's worth noting that Barbara Harris didn't arrive at this mission from the cold perspective of a theoretical eugenicist. She adopted four children born to a crack addict and was so enraged by the inherited deficits they struggled with that she felt moved to ensure that it didn't happen to others. And she would presumably argue – to counter the many critics of her scheme – that the 3,500 American men and women who've already taken up her offer should be reconfigured from a statistic of individual deprivation into a throng of children – we can't say exactly how many – who have been saved from suffering. Saved from pleasure too, of course, and the possibility of any kind of life at all – but, in some way, an engineered shortfall in the world's projected supply of problems.

And it's hardly surprising, really, that Harris's defence of her charity should depend so heavily on child suffering averted, because she needs a heavy counterweight to set against what she's actually doing. To argue that this arrangement will be more convenient for taxpayers might not quite tilt the balance.

Nobody, I take it, would propose that the world would be better off with more crack babies. But a simple thought-experiment should reveal the flaw in the morality of this enterprise. What would we feel if drug addicts were to be offered 20 or 30 hits of the drug of their choice to permanently surrender their fertility? One thing you would immediately grasp, I would suggest, is that an improper incentive was being offered – since addicts, by definition, are in no position to rationally weigh their short-term gain against a long-term loss (which is one reason why drug addicts' fertility sterility can be purchased at rock bottom prices).

Project Prevention pays cash, of course, but given that their clients – or victims – are addicts nobody can be in any doubt about what their windfall will be spent on. So the essential point is the same. The vulnerable are being deliberately exploited at their point of greatest weakness. That exploitation, Barbara Harris would argue, is in the interests of a greater good. Maybe she's right – but I just can't get past the fact that the rights of the living are being sacrificed to the rights of imaginary beings who are to be saved from living at all.

It's not that simple, Ken

Ken Loach was absolutely right to suggest that metastasised bureaucracy at the BBC has had a detrimental effect on the programmes it makes. But I do wish Loach hadn't expressed himself with such crude absolutism. "Television is the enemy of creativity" is a good banner for a barricade – and almost guaranteed to rally a strange kind of mob behind it – composed both of people who hate the BBC because it is too good, and those who hate it because it isn't good enough. But it's also transparent nonsense.

It's so much more complicated than that. Even Loach's complaint that the medium has been "reduced to a grotesque reality game" doesn't acknowledge that reality television itself can display creativity and – dare one say it – a Loachian social conscience. As Controller of BBC Three, for example, Danny Cohen presided over some grim exercises in lowest-common denominator wit but also Blood, Sweat and Tears and its successors – easily the most creative approach to the documenting of social injustice in the last ten years.

Cohen has just been appointed as the new Controller of BBC One, where I confidently predict he will be the enemy of creativity in some cases and its champion in others. And if Loach really wants better television he should be a bit more discriminating in his assaults.

Pamphlets and modern publishing don't mix

Can you have a launch if you haven't yet built the ship? Amazon did the other day – sending a new publishing idea down the slipway despite the fact that no examples of its new concept yet exist. It invited writers and publishers to produce what it called Kindle Singles – works between 10,000 and 30,000 words which aim to fill the gap between a long-form serious article and a full-blown book. A pamphlet, in other words – a publishing format which has had an effect on human history entirely disproportionate to its pagination, but which hasn't survived very well in the current dead-wood publishing economy.

Thomas Paine's Common Sense comes in at just over 50 pages in one online version – but where would such a thing be published now? Magazine editors would be insisting on brutal cuts while book publishers would be calling for expansions and padding that would blunt its penetrating brevity. How much in the way of literary flabbiness or argumentative spare tyre can be laid at the door, not of writers, but of an either-or publishing culture that can do long and short reasonably well but is baffled by inbetween?

I foresee only one problem. The absolute core of a pamphlet's power is the ability to read it quickly and pass it on. Will Amazon adapt their rigid copying and sharing restrictions to make their boats float?

t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk