Arel Kincaid on "Undivided Rights"

One point that stuck out to me while reading “Undivided Rights” was that not only does reproductive justice encompass the rights to birth control and abortion in an effort to avoid having children, but it also means combating systemic issues which prevent women from having children or punish them for having children. These elements not only ignore the structures implicit in keeping marginalized groups in poverty (which makes having a family difficult), but play directly into the hands of eugenics.

The authors focus on the reproductive struggles of women of color, particular Black women, and begin their analysis of these issues with the Nixon presidency. President Richard Nixon initially seized upon the idea of overpopulation to scare white Americans into supporting legislation which would limit the reproductive abilities of women of color in the United States. He then became less covert in his messaging and called for federal family planning services by citing growth specifically in the population of Black Americans ages five to nine. Similarly, “population alarmists” abandoned the rhetoric of overall population explosion in favor of touting ideas that this uptick in the number of Black children being born, especially in urban areas, would soon give rise to a generation of teenagers “with problems that can create social turbulence”.

Federal policies enacted during this period reflected the eugenicist nature of popular ideas. By the 1980’s and 90’s, fertility control drove the modification of welfare programs, punishing low-income people for having children, including women of color living under intergenerational poverty. For example, President Bill Clinton’s 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) placed a cap on the number of children a woman could have while receiving public assistance. Going over the cap meant having public assistance taken away, leaving families (often ones with newborn babies) without a safety net. Other aspects of welfare reform included marriage promotion and funding for abstinence-only sexual education, moves that further punished women of color for their fertility and sexuality without paying any mind to the systemic poverty they faced.

I recently read an essay for my Disability and US Society course that  I feel relates to this material titled “Eugenics” by disabilities author Rosemarie Garland-Thompson. In this paper, she makes the point that eugenics were initially the work of of a society having recently left that worldview that everything is the work and will of God, a society realizing that it would have to take its fate into its own hands and shape its own future. However, this future was to be shaped with little empathy toward those who could not produce as much under capitalism as was required for them to live. While Garland-Thompson’s paper speaks primarily to the plight of disabled people facing eugenics policies, it speaks as well to the mother who is receiving public assistance and loses benefits after giving birth to another child because of family caps. Production under capitalism is the way in which a person’s worth is measured in present society, and until capitalism is abolished, eugenics will always stand as a viable option to those in power to contain and control the “undesirables” who do not succeed in the capitalist game after being set up for failure in the first place through intersecting systemic oppressions.

One theme I would like to discuss in class is the co-opting of the idea of “Black Genocide” by white anti-choice activists when highlighting racial disparities in abortion rates in urban areas (namely Chicago).

“Eugenics”, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.26