Reproduction: It should never have been political

In the first chapter of Jael Silliman's Undivided Rights, the author focuses on the ways in which governmental programs themselves have targeted (and continue to target) women of color's reproductive rights. Silliman writes about divisive ways in which the government used to increase the rates at which black slave women were having children in order to produce more generations of slaves.This has since changed to divisive ways of decreasing the rates at which black women and other women of color are having children in order to ensure a controlled amount of people of color in America.

Silliman's accounts of these genocidal-like acts our government commits is horribly believable. We know during the enslavement of African Americans, the U.S. government went to drastic measures to dehumanize black people in America. They were used as a tool rather than viewed as people with needs and desires. In order to ensure that black slaves would remain under surveillance and control of their white oppressors, even dimensions of the right to give or not to give birth were decided by those deemed worthy to make the decision (influential white slave owners). Silliman describes the ways in which "black slave production" was enforced- "slave owners (using) rape and forced marriage to achieve this" (13). Today, we would never think that these sorts of practices could ever or should ever be condoned.

Today, the opposite has been the goal of targeted birth control- a decrease in the reproduction of black bodies. Silliman explains that President Nixon's own advisers prompted him to endorse reproductive limitations for women of color. They "assembled statistics that pointed to a 'bulge' in the number of black American between the ages of five and nine, claiming the cohort was 25 percent larger than ten years before. (They) warned that this group of youngsters soon entering their teens was 'an age group with problems that can create social turbulence" (14). This change in goal shows us just how devolved our government is that it can just use its power as a tactic to demobilize a group of people within our country.

This section of the book reminds me of a film I watched about the forced sterilization of Hispanic American women in the late 80s, called No Mas Bebes. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of women of color in America were being sterilized without their knowledge, let alone their consent, as a way to stop them from having "too many kids". It was a belief (and still is) that Hispanic women bear too many children and are unable to care for them, leaving the government to support bigger-than-usual families. Watching this film made me furious that the ability to manipulate someone's body in this manner even exists. The right to have or not to have children is the business of no one else but a woman and her intimate support circle of people who she will include in her decision. Reproduction should never be a political or demographical controversy because it is not the business of the public.

I wonder: how might white women be privileged over women of color when family planning is in question, even those white women who be under governmental support?