http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

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Introduction

The implementation of scientific research in the 19th century poorly constructed and scrutinized certain types of bodies in an effort to locate genetic differences that could be used to justify social inequalities and patriarchal norms within society. This practice of manipulating the perceptions of the human body continued into the 20th century with the emergence of new scientific developments in heredity and genetics, culminating in the racialized, biological concept known as the eugenics movement. The work of Gregor Mendel, notably his experimentation with peas, stipulated that the inheritance of physical and personal traits was predetermined by one's ancestral, genetic make-up. This implied that inheritance was an immediate process, and by selecting the fittest and most productive members of society to reproduce, a higher stock of humans could be possible for the future. Although this idea was not upheld through further empirical research, its social implications continued to influence rhetoric held by the burgeoning eugenics movement (McCann 103). Francis Galton, the forerunner and founder of eugenics, claimed that social characteristics such as poverty and illiteracy were directly linked to inheritance and thus could be eradicated by controlling the means of reproduction. Although the eugenics movement was infamous for its blatant inhumane and racist ideologies, it was seen as a logical solution to "better civilization" and thus mankind. The most notable advocate of the practice of eugenics as well as birth control was Margaret Sanger, an acclaimed women's rights activist and the founder of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood, although viewed as an institution that rallied for female reproductive freedoms, held a very racialized, social ideology that attempted to achieve genetic homogeneity through the advocacy of birth control within disadvantaged neighborhoods. This practice was extended to the point of allowing for the compulsory sterilization of those deemed "unfit and inferior" by White, societal norms. In the monumental Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell in 1927, Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes asserted that the state had the right to enforce sterilization based on the stipulation of police power. The guidelines to enforce coercive birth control were often vague and rarely dissented by medical physicians and practitioners. For instance, in the guise of obtaining consent from a patient, physicians would provide inaccurate information to gain the necessary “x” from an illiterate patient or parent such as in the case of the Minne Lee Relf. In the rise of conservative, anti-welfare movements, young women of color were forced to “volunteer” for sterilization procedures by being threatened with the removal of government assistance and benefits. Many of these victims of compulsory sterilization reported feeling less than complete as a woman because of their inability to reproduce. Because child rearing was seen as one of the most important, social expectations for women, those from underprivileged groups felt further disconnected and alienated by such family-societal norms. The specific way in which the African American female body was constructed and sexualized by eugenicists was largely used to justify and reinforce their inferior social status. By implementing compulsory sterilization on those deemed "genetically inferior," society asserted control over the means of reproduction of African American women, who suffered the most from social and racially demeaning stereotypes. The continued dehumanization of African American women, which predated back to slavery and arguably to the present day, was held by the imposition of negative social assumptions of such individuals as being unfit mothers and overly promiscuous sub-humans.

West Wing-Arianna's contribution

The overly sexualized representation of African American women within the United States of America as “promiscuous, savages beings” stems from the period of slavery and the era where the Black body was a commoditized item to White hegemonic rule. By identifying the African American female population as “animalistic” and amoral, White colonialists were able to view Black women as “insatiable” sexual fiends who were fundamentally inferior to that of the White man. The African body became an economic resource that would historically stereotype Black women as overemotional and overtly sexual individuals who could sustain poor, societal treatment as a result of their subhuman existence. “The sexual abuse of slaves was thus critical to the maintenance of slavery itself, while bonded women’s misrepresented sexuality was a specific female extension of modern slavery’s pervasive misrepresentation of human beings as property” (Campbell, Miers and Miller 225). The misrepresentation of African American women during the age of slavery allowed White slave owners to view Black women as “property” or chattel rather than human beings. By degrading their slaves to that of animals, White colonialists were able to implement physical and sexual abuse through acts such as breeding or forced reproduction.“ In every attack, abuse, and rape, the White slaves reify their false assertions that the Black African women are not human beings but slaves. They are imagined as savages with insatiable sexual appetites” (Rousseau 61). The sexualization of the African American female body at the hands of White colonialists was done as a means to “reify false assertions that Black African women were not human beings but slaves.” Treating the African American woman as a beast became a legitimate, social norm due to the economic greed and desire for power that was ingrained in the foundation of slavery. “Hooks asserts that planters are besieged by ‘virulent attacks on slave importation’ and turn to breeding slaves to encourage profit” (Rousseau 63). Breeding and other forced acts of sexual violence were imposed upon Black females as a result of society’s perception of African American women as subhuman fiends. Before the utilization of forced sterilization within the United States, African bodies were commodities to White slave owners who viewed the Black female vessel as an “encouraging profit.” “Black reproduction is treated as a form of degeneracy. Black mothers are seen to corrupt the reproduction process at every stage. Black mothers, it is believed, transmit inferior physical traits to the product of conception” (Roberts 9). The historical objectification of the Black female body allowed White society to not only look at the modern African American mother as unfit, but viewed the very notion of “Black reproduction” as a “form of degeneracy.” After the abolition of slavery, the ease involved in exterminating the African American race was due in part to the loss of economic value of the Black female body. African American people, as a whole, were seen as degenerate race and a strain on the American welfare system. The continued degradation of the Black female body and their “transmission of inferior traits” was further capitalized by White society through historic theories on genetics and a movement that would seek an end to the reproduction of the African American population: the eugenics movement.

Theories on genetics and hereditary traits and the eugenics movement of the late 1880’s were racialized, scientific concepts that attempted to link social properties such as poverty, illiteracy, and socioeconomic welfare to genetic reproduction. When eugenics was applied to African American communities, it was believed that the increase in number of immigrant groups was threatening the “purity” of the White race and should therefore be restrained by instruments of forced sterilization. Reproductive technologies such as coercive hysterectomies and tubal ligation would be performed on women from “minority” backgrounds without their consent or conscious knowledge. In an attempt to justify such atrocities, scientists looked to Gregor Mendel who, through his study on pea stipulation, stated that physical and personal traits were predetermined by one’s ancestral, genetic make-up. “ Mendelian genetics posited that germ plasm, the substance of heredity, consisted of discrete and nonblendable factors that were passed unaltered from parent to offspring in sexual reproduction” (McCann 103). By claiming that “the substance of hereditary” remained unalterable between parent and child, Mendel presumed that inheritance was a direct, immediate process that initiated the need for “genetically-fit” reproduction. This notion of genes being passed on from parent to offspring also made the assumption that in order to create the “greatest stock of human beings,” individuals needed to find the fittest mates. The eugenics movement would further this claim by stipulating that the only way to secure a physically superior race of humans would be to hinder the very expansion of lower-income communities. “The eugenics movement was based on the theories promoted in the late 1880s by Francis Galton which alleged that social conditions like poverty and illiteracy are uncontrollably inherited” (Kramarae and Spender 639). The founder of the eugenics movement, Francis Dalton, reasoned that based on genetics, social properties such as “poverty and illiteracy” were directly related to inheritance rather than to one’s economic condition. By claiming that social properties were correlated to an individual’s level of literacy and economic standing, figures such as Dalton and later Margaret Sanger, would view lower socioeconomic communities as genetically degenerate and useless. “Though wholly inhumane in its blatant and overt message of forcible sterilization of the so called unfit-which typically means Blacks, eugenics is presented as an intelligent, logical, even harmonious way to better civilization” (Rousseau 106). Eugenics held a “blatant and overt message of forcible sterilization” of “unfit,” underprivileged communities that not only labeled African American individuals as overly sexual beings, but a direct threat to White society. The eugenics movement attempted to exterminate those that were deemed unprofitable to the nation and was seen as a “logical, even harmonious way to better civilization.” Rather than claim that eugenics was a theoretical, scientific concept that degraded minority groups and viewed them as second class citizens, the movement was portrayed as an intelligent plan that would hinder the continued reproduction of “unfit” human beings. “Teaching hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on poor black women as practice for their medical residents. This sort of abuse was so widespread in the South that these operations came to be known as ‘Mississippi appendectomies’ ” (Roberts 90). Reproductive techniques such as hysterectomies were used as a form of coercive birth control to deter the growth of both African American and other minority communities within the United States. With support from the eugenics movement, physicians employed such reproductive procedures as a means to destroy the wombs of patients that were deemed secondary to Whites. States such as Mississippi, Alabama, and New York, which held large communities of individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds, were areas that were coercively de-populated by forced sterilization. “Basically there are two forms of female sterilization: 1) tubal ligation in which the tubes which carry the egg from the ovary into the womb are tied. 2) hysterectomy in which the whole of the womb is removed” (Slater 151). Techniques such as tubal ligation and hysterectomies were mechanisms implemented by medical physicians who viewed African American women as a detrimental threat to the White race. Without the consent of their patients, medical experts utilized coercive birth control that would both respectively cut the “tubes which carry the egg from the ovary into the womb” and remove “the whole womb.” Reproductive technologies implemented by racist doctors and followers of the eugenics movement were not only issued as means to exterminate African Americans, but were popularized by revered individuals such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of the top abortion clinic in the nation: Planned Parenthood.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of the nation’s top abortion clinic Planned Parenthood, advocated the utilization of the eugenics movement to “improve” the genetic composition of the American population. Sanger believed that sterilization of the “unwanted” masses was necessary in order to hinder the reproduction of individuals who were “feebleminded,” idiotic, and threat to societal progression. Planned Parenthood, which was founded by Sanger, would not only become the top abortion-procedure clinic in the nation, but the largest supporter of forced sterilization. “A woman’s rights activist and a nurse, Margaret Sanger, prescribes to Galton’s theories of eugenics and applies its ideologies to the ongoing battle for contraceptive rights in the U.S,” (Rousseau 107). Sanger, who was inspired by Galton’s eugenics model, believed that “contraceptive rights” within the United States should be focused on the maintenance of a pure, superior race of individuals. The “ideologies” Sanger followed, which were aimed at hindering the progression of those she deemed as “feebleminded,” were discriminatory towards African American and Latino communities. Sanger, who was a “woman’s rights activist and a nurse,” remained prejudice towards minority groups she believed would spoil human society with their ill-manufactured genes. “ ‘STERILIZATION of the feebleminded and the encouragement of this operation upon those afflicted with inherited diseases does not deprive the individual of his or her sex expression, but merely renders him incapable of producing children’ ”(Rousseau 107). Sanger believed that forced sterilization of the “feebleminded” was beneficial to society in that it would exterminate human beings with problematic, threatening genes. Although she was revered as a prominent, feminist activist, Sanger viewed the African American communities of the United States as a mentally venomous group of individuals. “Planned Parenthood is a provider of abortion against African Americans. Dr. George Grant observed. ‘Planned Parenthood shifted its focus to school-based clinics, it again targeted inner-city minority neighborhoods” (Parker 123). Planned Parenthood, under its founder Margaret Sanger, “targeted inner-city minority neighborhoods” while maintaining racist ideologies that viewed African Americans as a poisonous, unintelligent race of individuals. As presented by Dr. George Grant, Planned Parenthood sought out areas where it could commence its extermination of unwanted minority groups. “ ‘I never realized how racist those people were until I read the things they were giving Dedrea at the school clinic. They’re as bad as the Klan. Maybe worse, because they’re so slick and sophisticated” (Grant 116). Rather than portray their racism in an explicit manner, Planned Parenthood initiated its prejudice through concealed actions such as shifting its focus towards school-based clinics as a means commence the sterilization of the African American youth. By overlooking the need of consent from their patients, Planned Parenthood was able to sterilize hundreds of African American women without any interventions. Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood’s wish to rid the nation of the “racially unwanted” masses was due in part to their belief that such individuals brought only economic hardships to society. Rather than be viewed as a beneficial community to the United States, African Americans, whom during slavery were commoditized beings, was seen as a drain to America’s welfare system.

Works Cited;

Campbell, Gwyn, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Calder Miller. Women and Slavery / The Modern Atlantic. Athens: Ohio UP, 2007. Print.

Grant, George. Grand Illusions: the Legacy of Planned Parenthood. Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1988. Print.

Kramarae Cheris and Dale Spender. Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women : Global Women's Issues and Knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

McCann, Carole. Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Parker, Star. Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can Do about It. Nashville, TN: WND, 2003. Print.

Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.New York: Pantheon, 1997.

Rousseau, Nicole. Black Woman's Burden: Commodifying Black Reproduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Slater, Jack. "Threat to the Poor." Ebony Magazine 23 Oct. 1970: 150.

East Wing-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” (Nelson 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” (Nelson 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” (Nelson 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.

           

Conclusion

Historically, family-planning clinics, most notably Margaret Sanger’s racially discriminatory institution or Planned Parenthood, were strategically placed in impoverished neighborhoods typically populated by minority groups such as African Americans and Latinos. The placement of such abortion clinics was done purposefully by leaders of reproductive freedoms in order to monitor, control, and hinder the rate of reproduction of populations that were seen as “genetically inferior” to the White race. Theories held by Mendel and Galton pertaining to genes and inheritance claimed that the transmission of genes from parent to offspring was an unchangeable, immediate process that determined one’s genetic-makeup. Social properties such as illiteracy and poverty were also perceived as being directly linked to an individual’s genetic being, which thus motivated scientists and physicians such as Sanger to attempt to deter the expansion of minority groups through forced sterilization. Cases such as Buck v. Bell and Relf v. Weinberger exemplified the racism that was held within the very foundation of Planned Parenthood by presenting real-life racist instances that involved Black women being coercively sterilized without their consent. Forced or rather “volunteered” uses of sterilization, which was presented in historical studies such as the “Negro Project,” attempted to conceal the desires held by individuals such as Sanger in completely exterminating the “Negro population.” Black women, such as Nial Ruth Cox, were constantly forced to forfeit their reproductive rights for fear of not retrieving fair welfare assistance that were afforded to their White female counterparts. While the theoretical concept and biological movement of eugenics as a genetic study was largely discredited by the scientific world, its implications remain very real and explicit in the present day. The construction of the African American female body was initially perceived as a commodity to the White man, but after the abolition of slavery, Black women and their offspring were seen as economic burdens on the United States welfare system. Black reproduction itself became synonymous with the degeneracy of humankind and a threat to the notion of White hegemony. It was held evident that the progression of humanity was only possible through the extermination of society’s weakest links: the "Negro population." Media-based representations of African American women in the present still perpetuate social stereotypes of African American women as unfit mothers, “welfare queens,” and promiscuous subhumans. A particularly salient example from 2009 is the film Precious that depicts the tale of a young, pregnant African American woman living in poverty and supported by governmental assistance. This film, in particular, provides a representation of how African American women are continuously constructed under a hyper sexualized lens within society. Not only are the stereotypes of Black women still perpetuated through the media, they are also overly represented in the practices held by current community-based clinics. For instance, in New York City, there is billboard that indicates that the “most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” Representations such as these directly discourages African American communities from reproducing by crudely and severely over-emphasizing the rate of abortions that are held within such groups of individuals. In order to properly address these discriminating, structural problems and the glaring and expanding racial inequalities that exist within the modern day, society must seek not to create and enforce racial boundaries and differences between people but directly address social prejudices, stereotypes, and inequalities.