Undivided Rights-Zain Dababneh

In Chapter 3 of Undivided Rights, it focuses on African American Women and their role as activists for reproductive justice and how the fight for them has been very different than the white feminist reproductive justice movement. One point in the reading that I am going to discuss is how African American women, ever since slavery, have been seen as breeders, and that after the abolition of slavery, institutional powers and racism then continued to abuse their bodies through things such as forced sterilization, in which I will go into further detail.

When it comes to contraception, African American women started a movement that revolved around resisting and organizing. In the reading, it says how they started to educate themselves about contraception, which reminded me of Margaret Sanger and the eugenicists movement to control an "unfit" population. This movement is what ultimately led to the United States to permit mass sterilization in order to control the population, but what many people do not know is how this truly impacted mostly African American women. The idea of forced sterilization reminds me of this idea called “biopower,” which is essentially the struggle of control and the fight for power over women’s bodies and the way governments can control aspects of our biological livelihoods. Sterilization is one of the many examples of how people with power have been controlling the reproductive choices of African American since the beginning of slavery in the United States.

While reading this, it reminded me of the story of the Relf sisters. They were two black girls in Montgomery, Alabama and they were unknowingly sterilized at the ages of 12 and 14 because their mom “consented” to the procedure. Their mom, Mrs. Relf, who was illiterate, was told to mark an X on a document, not knowing it agreed to the sterilization of her daughters, as she was told another thing. They told Mrs. Relf that by signing, it would continue the daughters’ Depro-Provera shots, but they lied and deceived Mrs. Relf, and then continued to forcefully sterilize two young black girls. This is one small portion of the many black women who were sterilized all over the United States, as noted in the reading. The United States government allowed for the sterilization abuse of many black women. Instead of population control, we must bring reproductive freedom to the live of black women, which is stressed many times in this chapter.

While discussing sterilization abuse, it reminded me of when Nick Cannon said publicly that Planned Parenthood is modern day eugenics and population control. To quote Cannon, “‘Hillary was [sneaking] ... Think about all the stuff they did with Planned Parenthood and all that type of stuff. That type of stuff is to take our community and forget gentrification, it’s real genocide, and it’s been like that for years...This system is not built for us. This is not our land. I appreciate it. I love it, wouldn’t want to live nowhere else, but this wasn’t designed for our people.”’ It is interesting to see how he sees Planned Parenthood in a more critical eye. He also said, “It’s modern-day eugenics...It’s population control.” I, for one, have never thought of Planned Parenthood as modern day eugenics, but to think about the history of reproductive abuse black women experienced, and still do experience, it is not an idea I can ultimately dismiss.

Nick Cannon’s comment is quite intriguing. I want to discuss how to justify his position on Planned Parenthood. One can argue that having these resources accessible is a form of reproductive freedom, but considering our nation’s history, look’s are deceiving. I mean, the founder of Planned Parenthood is Margaret Sanger...it is really complex.