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| http://livingjourney.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/abortion.png Testimonial from Nial Cox Ramirez, Victim of Forced Sterilization Charline's Contribution: The bodies of African American women have been constructed and reconstructed to suit the purposes of the white-dominated society. During times of slavery, the bodies and reproduction of slave women was an economic commodity to society, their bodies used for breeding and renewing a cheap source of labor for plantation owners (Rousseau 62). Following the abolition of slavery in the United States and the breakdown of the plantation system in favor of the capitalist industrial era, the construction of black female bodies underwent a significant transformation, from that of viable commodity to that of an economic burden. “Whereas the United States previously relied on Blacks as instruments of production and reproduction for maximization of agricultural profit; now, Black production has become a threat to White production and Black reproduction has become a social problem” (90). This process was not immediate, however, and many relics from slavery continued despite the legal abolition that allowed for a continuation of the low social status of black females. These remnants of slavery include the construction of female bodies as primitive and sexually amoral, unable to control their reproduction, although under slavery reproduction was hardly a choice afforded to them. The specific cultural historical context asserts that “Black women exist within a particular social location in the United States, rooted in socially accepted discrimination and institutionalized misogyny and racism” (91). The continuation of discrimination against blacks in American history was justified by “the depraved, self-perpetuating character of Blacks themselves that leads to their inferior social status” (Roberts 9). This is an attempt to differentiate bodies based on an intrinsic, biological difference, which was therefore be used to treat black bodies with less respect than white bodies. If the difference is considered natural, it is not considered inhumane to advocate differential treatment, thus justifying extreme measures of compulsory sterilization. Because African American female bodies were considered distinctive from Caucasian female bodies at this time, their reproduction had distinct consequences on society. “White childbearing is generally thought to be a beneficial activity [that…] allows the nation to flourish” while “Black mothers are seen to corrupt the reproduction process at every stage” (9). “The stereotype of Black women as sexually promiscuous also defined them as bad mothers” because it was asserted, with Mendelian hereditary logic, that they would pass this supposed sexual amorality to their children and further degenerate the black race (11). Not only were black women considered promiscuous, but they were also supposedly possessed an “innate hyperfertility” that gives them no “control [of] their own fertility” (12), thus justifying the need for governmental intervention of their reproductive rights. Another myth about black motherhood is the image of the welfare queen: “Poor Black mothers do not simply procreate irresponsibly; they purposely have more and more children to manipulate taxpayers into giving them more money” (17). What this negative stereotype suggests is that not only do Black women have no restraint on their sexuality and reproduction, but they do not want it because then they would have to feed their families themselves. In fact, “the media often connect[s] the welfare debate to notorious cases of neglectful mothers, leaving the impression that all welfare mothers squander their benefits on their own bad habits rather than caring for their children” (18). A notorious image used in the wake of welfare reforms in the 1990s was that of “The Chicago 19” who were “barely clothed” (18) and poorly fed while their mothers took in supposedly $5000 a month in welfare (19). “This bizarre family came to represent welfare mothers rather than the far more representative women who devote themselves to making ends meet for the sake of their children” (20). By sensationalizing a rare case of neglectful mothers on welfare, the media helped articulate a negative concept of social welfare abuse that was used to cut back funding and justify the denial of welfare benefits for those deemed overly-sexual and overly-fertile. This welfare queen image is coupled with an image of crack babies (19). This stereotype of crack babies, who have no hope to contribute “anything positive to society” (19), stems from the idea that black mothers engage in destructive behavior during pregnancy, not only instilling their bad and inferior genes on their children but also instilling neurological damage (19). Not only are the black mothers constructed as degenerates, but their kids are assumed to be a “bio-underclass” (20) in which “these children are unalterably defective, any attempt to improve their lives through social spending will be futile” (20). It was therefore considered wasteful to even attempt to implement social welfare policies to improve their lives. Attempts to control and in fact inhibit black reproduction through means such as forced and coercive sterilization “perpetuates the view that racial inequality is caused by Black people themselves and not by an unjust social order” (21). This concept is important in understanding the context in which the government and the very implicit agenda of eugenicists was able to exert just explicit control over the reproductive rights of African American women and other disadvantaged groups. Compulsory and coercive sterilization would have been unimaginable without the presence and prevalence of these ideas and ideologies, premised on racist conjecture and specific to the historical power dynamic structure. The bodies of African American women, thus, were constructed and sexualized in order to perpetuate this power structure. Following the construction of black female mothers as unfit and unworthy of the right to reproduction and the rise of the eugenic movement, many legal mandates arouse to restrict their reproductive rights. For instance, “Eugenics also championed marriage restrictions to prevent the coupling of fit and unfit persons, which, by Mendelian logic, would spread hereditary taints” (McCann 114). Eugenicists, in their interest in promoting a higher-stock of the human race, were often against mating between races because it could “deteriorate the white race” (Roberts 71). In fact, “[b]y 1940, thirty states had passed statutes barring interracial marriage” (71). This is a further extension of the historical misconception of the races as biologically distinct, thus these supposed differences were used to justify differential social status and treatment. Eugenicists believed, however, that “marriage restrictions were inadequate by themselves to stop racial decay” because “[t]hose people whose marriage should be restricted […] lacked the moral fiber to be dissuaded from procreated by the taint of illegitimacy” (McCann 114), thus other more severe measures had to be implemented to protect this agenda because of the negative construction of African American females as hypersexual. The Supreme Court played a crucial role in validating the logic and agenda of eugenicists by establishing a legal precedent for compulsory sterilization “in the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell” (114). “By the 1930s, Black women are commonly considered feeble-minded, promiscuous, and generally degenerate” (Rousseau 110). Thus, the authority of the states to authorize compulsory sterilization for those with undesirable genetic traits such as feeble-mindedness was used specifically to justify the sterilization of thousands of African American women. It is important to consider that although by no means were African American women the only targets of these compulsory sterilization programs, a significant proportion of these sterilizations were done on African Americans. In North Carolina, for instance, the Eugenics Commission sterilized over 7600 women, and approximately 5000 of them were African American (110). The Supreme Court’s legitimization of compulsory sterilization left very vague provisions for the administration of the procedure, essentially leaving the option to sterilize to the discretion of the physician, without any uniform protections for the girls in question. For instance, “[s]ome women of color and poor women had experienced sterilization after a physician had agreed to perform an illegal abortion; others were pressured into sterilization after receiving a legal hospital abortion. If this woman could not care for a child, a doctor might reason, she had no right to her fertility” (Neilson 65). This further constructs African American women as subhuman, placing their reproduction in the control of a doctor who does not necessarily have her best interests or health in mind but rather a lofty and racist agenda for social improvement based on a very implicit power dynamic structure. The doctor did not necessarily even have to inform the patient let alone get her consent to perform the surgery. Civil right activist Fannie Lou Hamer was one such victim of this practice: “She had suffered this violation when she went to the hospital for the removal of a small uterine tumor in 1961. The doctor took the liberty of performing a complete hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent” (Roberts 90). After learning about this violation of her human and reproductive rights, Hamer delivered “a speech before the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, [and] reported that 60 percent of black women who passed through Sunflower City hospital in her hometown in Mississippi were sterilized, many of them without their knowledge” (Neilson 68). Another infamous instance of coercion that has been exposed is in the case of Relf v. Weinberger, in which two young African American sisters who had been undergoing experimental Depo-Provera shots were subjugated to sterilization with no knowledge of the procedure. In fact, the doctors misled their illiterate mother into signing her X on the consent forms by telling her they were forms for the continuation of the shots, despite a national ban on the shots “when they were linked to cancer in laboratory animals” (Roberts 93). The nurses and doctors “apparently believ[ed] that their race and poverty made these young girls candidates for birth control” (93) and even the more extreme measure of sterilization because of the stereotype of promiscuity, despite a lack of indicative evidence that these girls were in fact sexually active. The lack of enforcement and regulation requiring notification of and consent for such a severe and permanent procedure rendering women incapable of reproduction is appalling, yet indicative of the social structure and norms guiding the principle. It was justifiable to these eugenicists and their ideals to deny African American women these basic protections because it was considered an act for the greater good and future vitality of society. Beginning in the 1930s and extending well past the 1960s, birth control advocates such as Margaret Sanger proposed opening federal or state funded community clinics with the intent to provide low-income women access to and information about birth control. The placement of such clinics was strategic and based upon the eugenicist’s ideology of bettering society through population control and weeding out the unfit and undesired, those tainted with poverty and other disadvantageous social characteristics. These characteristics were associated not with the social hierarchy itself but by the attempts to differentiate body types by means of faulty scientific conjecture. The influence of eugenicist ideologies had a corrupting effect on the real advances made by such clinics. Several notable and notorious institutes occur in New York City’s Harlem in the Negro Project and in North Carolina within the context of the Eugenics Commission. “Though [Margaret Sanger’s ‘Negro Project’ in Harlem was] presented as a program to offer marginalized Black communities access to reproductive information and healthcare, through the manipulation of Black doctors and clergy, the project actually serves as a vehicle to persuade Blacks to curb reproduction and volunteer for surgical sterilization” (Rousseau 110). The degree of choice behind such initiatives for volunteering for sterilization is minimal and ceremonial at best, and arguably these instances are a form of coercive rather than compulsory sterilization, with similar implications of denying these women their reproductive rights. For instance, in the instance of Nial Ruth Cox, “clinic workers [in North Carolina] had explained to her that she risked losing the welfare benefits that supported her, her mother, and her 10 siblings if she rejected the sterilization procedure” (Neilson 72). Not only was Nial Ruth Cox manipulated into consenting to such a procedure, but she appears to have been given very little information on the exact implications of sterilization. “Cox had not known that her sterilization had rendered her infertile until the fall of 1970. When she discovered her infertility, her fiancée broke their engagement” (72). This coercion thus removed her choice and freedom and played upon her lack of knowledge in order to gain the desired results, for she was not afforded the same rights and protections that middle-class, white women would have been. Further, there are severe implications on a woman’s personhood by being rendered infertile: “Cox confided to an interviewer that her sterilization made her ‘feel like half a woman. No man wants half a woman. A man is going to look for someone who can give him a child. I don’t even look anymore” (72). The norms and goals of mainstream society directed a women’s self-definition and life purpose as a pursuit of motherhood. By denying African American women the means to achieve these social goals, society further dehumanized and devalued them, continuing to reinforce a social hierarchy based on a presumption of inferiority. |
