Alex Phistry on Undivided Rights

            Undivided Rights is a marvelously written piece that is bursting with critical information and background history on reproductive health, rights, and wrongdoings in the United States. One of the arguments made by the author is that there was a distinct difference between voluntary birth control for white, upper-class women and population control/forced sterilization for women of color.

            The author(s) argue that while African American women were supportive of birth control while still aware that it was used as a tool to promote and regulate white supremacy. While this makes me think of the saying, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” it also leads me to contemplate on how America has a long history of making things “too good to be true” only to pull the rug out from whomever they are deceiving. In this case, eugenics was the tactic used in order to weed out people deemed “unfit” for reproducing, ultimately leading to forced sterilization of nearly 100,000 people. It is important to note that the majority of people who were forcefully sterilized were people of color. It is no wonder that people of color have a history of opposition to family planning policies; especially due to these policies being used as a way to legally and covertly endorse the genocide of people of color.

            One of the other ways in which the United States deceived and manipulated people into believing population control was morally the right thing to do was by indicating that making birth control more accessible would “eliminate poverty,” (60). In doing so, the United States made people believe that in controlling population growth in areas where poverty was high, that there would be a drastic decrease in the overall poverty level. This tactic was clearly aimed at people, namely women, of color—which also indicated and perpetuated the idea that only people of color were affected by poverty. It also perpetuated the idea that it is women of color who are to blame for the high population and whose reproductive rights need to be regulated or controlled.

These unjust and immoral beliefs were so highly publicized that the same beliefs are still present in today’s society; and I believe it’s this history of a false belief system that continues to fuel racist/classist/sexist attitudes and behavior. In the government as well as upper-class, white people creating a new category of “other” in people (women) of color they have created animosity toward these people (the idea of “welfare queens”) by making them the objects of wrongdoings in society. This idea was beneficial to those belonging to the upper-class, white society in that it shifted public focus of the working and lower classes off the real wrongdoers, those rich people who were stealing or redirecting government funds to keep themselves rich, to those who genuinely needed funds or government assistance. This is just one example of the multitude of unethical actions/behaviors that are common to the American government and white, male, upper-class to shift angry focus from themselves to those more vulnerable subjects; this case being the lower-class and people (women) of color.