Abortion was first criminalized in the U.S. in the mid-19th century. A key argument was that too many white women were ending their pregnancies.
Beisel and Kay write that nineteenth-century doctors, who led the fight for anti-abortion laws, saw ending a pregnancy as anathema to women’s role in the world. Anti-abortion leader Hortio Storer wrote that woman was “what she is in health, in character, in her charms, alike of body, mind and soul because of her womb alone.”
Abortion, the doctors argued, was very likely to be fatal, or at least to drive a woman insane. Beisel and Kay note that it certainly was a scary and painful procedure at the time, but that historians have found it was still safer than childbirth. Many doctors were opposed to contraceptives as well, seeing any sexual relationship in which conception was prevented as a form of prostitution.
And yet, women—white, middle-class women in particular—were clearly avoiding having children. Doctors’ writings expressed horror at the contrast between the declining fertility of native-born Anglo-Saxon women and the large families of Irish Catholics and other immigrants. Of ten abortion-related books and tracts directed to the public that Beisel and Kay found at the Library of Congress, six included warnings about the potential demise of the Anglo-Saxon race, and two others alluded to the different fertility rates of Protest and Catholic families.
It's interesting because this same language about Protestants, patriotism, free schools and American homes, as contrasted with immigrants and the "Romish," was repurposed in KKK publications in the 1920s.Doctors contrasted middle-class native-born women’s supposed use of abortion to serve their vanity with the Catholic Church’s firm stance on the subject. One wrote that “in the Romish church, murder and suicide in any form is regarded in all its horror and enormity, and as a natural result, the Catholic element in this country is rapidly increasing.” Another wrote of the duty of patriotic white couples “to the great American idea of free schools and a free Protestant religion and free institutions for all, that they stop murdering their children, and stop trying to defeat nature in any way, so that our American homes many again become populous with incipient citizens and voters, and so that the American family shall not become an extinct institution in this country.”
More in link.In 1976, the U.S Department of Health, Education, and Welfare reported that over 37% of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico had been sterilized. The vast majority were in their twenties.
A prime mover of this outcome was Clarence Gamble, President of the Pennsylvania Birth Control Federation, founding member of the Human Betterment League and later of Birthright, heir to the Proctor & Gamble/Ivory Soap fortunes, and correspondent and colleague of Margaret Sanger. Through the years he was involved in initiatives in Israel, India, Hawaii, Egypt, Japan, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Pakistan, South Africa, and, in the US, Appalachia and the South, where he maintained that a reduction in the birthrate among African Americans was the solution to the region’s poverty.
In 1939, Gamble began flying Puerto Rican doctors to New York to learn the latest in sterilization techniques. Earlier in the decade he had staffed birth control clinics, established by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Puerto Rican Relief Administration, with his own fieldworkers and used them as sites for recruiting candidates for sterilization. Many of the women who submitted to tubal ligation were not made to understand that it was permanent. Some Gamble-supported facilities reported refusing admittance to women with who had given birth two or more times if they did not ‘consent’ to la operación. In 1968, roughly 30 years into Gamble’s involvement in Puerto Rico, women there had the highest sterilization rates in the world.
More in link.Madrigal v. Quilligan was a civil rights class action lawsuit filed by 10 Mexican American women against the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center for involuntary or forced sterilization. The plaintiffs involved in Madrigal v. Quilligan were residents of East Los Angeles, a predominantly Latinx population with inadequate medical and educational resources. Unauthorized sterilizations among Mexican women with minimal English proficiency rose at the County Medical Center during the 1970s. Among the victims were Dolores Madrigal, who claimed that doctors pressured her into signing a sterilization consent form while she was in labor, and Jovita Rivera, who signed the concession document without being counseled on the consequences of sterilization.
Dr. Bernard Rosenfield, a young physician at the county General Hospital, acted as the whistleblower by exposing testimony on the doctors’ malpractice on low income and minority women. Dr. Rosenfield requested the legal services of Model Cities Center for Law and Justice, where lawyers Antonia Hernandez and Charles Navarette managed the case. The lawyers collaborated with Comisión Feminil, a feminist organization led by Gloria Molina and argued their case on the basis of Roe v. Wade, claiming that women possessed the reproductive rights to procreate and to an abortion.
The California federal court under Judge Jesse W. Curtis ruled in favor of the county medical center and held that sterilizations were the result of miscommunication and language barriers between the patients and the doctors. Despite losing the case, the plaintiffs influenced the California Department of Health to implement new sterilization procedures, including bilingual informational materials that explained the process and consequences of sterilization. The State of California also revoked their sterilization law, which had enabled over 20,000 unauthorized sterilization operations to occur.
Much more in link.Population control advocates gained momentum when, in 1907, Sir
Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, founded the Eugenics
Education Society, which was based upon his ideas regarding who was fit to
reproduce and who was not.’ Galton first used the word eugenics in 1883 to
describe “the use of genetics to improve the human race.” Galton’s writings
helped produce a new discipline: the science of “race improvement.”
His theories moved increasingly toward the utilization of eugenics to check the birth
rate of the “unfit.”sMany early eugenicists incorporated into their discipline
Gregor Mendel’s theories concerning transmission of common traits in
plants. Expanding on Mendel’s discoveries, eugenicists “espoused the theory
that a wide variety of individual maladies and even social ills, such as poverty,
were eugenic (incurable) in nature and that the best solution was prevention
by sterilization.”
The eugenics movement, popular throughout the world by the early twen-
tieth century, prompted some American states to introduce compulsory steril-
ization statutes. Prior to that time, the government sterilized persons only for
punitive reasons.10 In 1907, Indiana enacted America’s first compulsory
eugenic sterilization (CES) law, with fifteen other states enacting similar laws
during the following two decades. Although these statutes were eventually
declared unconstitutional, the ground-breaking 1927 case of Buck v. Bell upheld
Virginia’s CES law.
This case looked at three generations of women: Emma Buck, her daughter Carrie,
and Carrie’sdaughter Vivian. Because these women
were all considered slow, eugenicists argued that this family provided proof that
mentally retarded genes are inherited. The decisionjustified the state’sright to
intervene in an institutionalizedmentally retarded person’s reproductive rights.
Eugenic lobbyists declared victory when they learned that Carrie Buck’smother,
Emma, had been committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and
Feebleminded at Lynchburg four years prior to the case. A Red Cross worker,
Caroline E. Wilhelm, testified that Carrie’s seven-month-old baby, Vivian,
appeared slow and feebleminded.” This case affirmed eugenicists’beliefs that
undesirable qualitiesin a productive society,such as mental retardation, poverty,
and immorality, are inherited.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ decision to allow the sterilization of
Carrie Buck helped launch a “negative eugenics” era. This meant that eugeni-
cists had moved on from a “positive” eugenic attitude, which encouraged
those considered the carriers of superior genetic material to reproduce, to a
more drastic solution. Negative eugenics called for fertility control of the so-
called unfit by segregation in institutions and asylums where they could be
monitored or sterilized. Holmes stated that, “it is better for all the world if
instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them
starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit
from continuing their kind. The principle that sanctions compulsory vacci-
nation is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”12 Within the
following decade, twenty-six more states passed laws allowing involuntary steril-
izations. Vivian Buck, however, did not end up in an institution. She attended
Venable Public Elementary School in Charlottesville where she qualified for
the honor roll in 1931.13
Even though several states had no statutes to prohibit voluntary steriliza-
tion, physicians and hospitals avoided aggressive sterilization practices
because of possible malpractice suits. Attitudes changed following the 1969
Jessin v. County ofShasta (California) case which determined that no legislative
policy existed to prohibit sterilizations.14 Another liberalization of steriliza-
tion practices occurred when the American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists (ACOG) dropped its “Rule of 120,”an age/parity formula for
female sterilization. If a woman’s number of living children, multiplied by her
age, equaled 120, she could undergo sterilization.
Though not legally binding, a majority of hospitals observed this formula.
In addition the ACOG dismissed its recommendation for two physicians’
signature along with the rule
that a psychiatric consultation be obtained before scheduling a sterilization
procedure.15 While middle-class libertarians celebrated easier access to and
control over their reproductive rights, poor women and women of color
became the major targets of coercive sterilization abuse.16
Other significant influences in the late 1960s, such as government con-
cern over the growing population, prompted President Richard M. Nixon’s
appointment of John D. Rockefeller I11 as chairman of the new Commission
on Population and the American Future. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s pre-
vious War on Poverty reflected fear that world resources would not be able to
provide for the future population. Political and social pressures to limit fami-
ly size and push sterilization helped lead to the new Office of Economic
Opportunity, an organization that sought federal funds to provide not only
education and training to the poor, but also a less well-known service: contra-
ception. The Family Planning Act of 1970 passed the Senate by an over-
whelming vote of 298 to thirty-two.”
Statistics reflect the combined impact that this new legislation and med-
ical practices had on minority women. During the 1970s, HEW funded 90 per-
cent of the annual sterilization costs for poor people. Sterilization for women
increased 350 percent between 1970 and 1975 and approximately one million
American women were sterilized each year. 18
Physicians and social workers found themselves in a potent situation in
which they could use, but in reality abuse, their authority in dealing with poor
and minority families and their reproductive rights. The conflicting needs
and rights between women of different economic background and color coin-
ciding with new fertility laws, medical advancement, and tenacious eugenic
lore, culminated in disaster for many women. Inevitably, examples of blatant
and subtle coercion became public.
The tragic sterilization of two black sisters, Mary Alice Relf, age twelve, and
Minnie Lee, fourteen, on 14 June 1973
shocked the nation. The medical procedure was completed through the ille-
gal actions of the Montgomery,Alabama Community Action Family Planning
Clinic, an HEW funded and controlled agency. The illiterate welfare mother
of these girls had signed an X for her name on medical forms that she
believed gave doctors permission to administer shots to prevent pregnancy.19
Federal suits filed by the girls’ father, Lonnie, asked for the cessation of ster-
ilization funding and experimental drug use. This case ultimately stimulated
a backlash from many women’s civil rights groups and led to the formation of
several anti-sterilization organizations such as the Committee to End
Sterilization Abuse, and the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against
Sterilization Abuse.20
This is funny?
okay.This is only a fraction of the picture, so this is not accurate.as well Choice and birth control mean fewer to go shopping.
i dont think 'they' GAF other than wanting more humans to "shop" which means giving RWGs more money.
RWG dont GAF about anything other than that.
This quote is from an article in the Winston-Salem Journal's "Against The Will" series, which was a multi-article special report that was on their website for over a decade. It was harrowing to read and detailed that it wasn't just Black people targeted, but low-income whites that the so-called RWGs wanted eliminated. The series led to a reparations program for the generation of people still living who were affected by this "pop control." That's how extensive and notorious North Carolina's "pop control" programs were.For more than 40 years North Carolina ran one of the nation's largest and most aggressive sterilization
programs. It expanded after World War II, even as most other states pulled back in light of the horrors of
Hitler's Germany.
Contrary to common belief, many of the thousands marked for sterilization were ordinary citizens, many of
them young women guilty of nothing worse than engaging in premarital sex.
Literally everything?jeezos wants your money. i know some who still continue to buy literally 'everything' from ama-zone.
Well, I get that trees and whatnot are more important to you than human beings. And that like a lot of the more misanthropic environmentalists such as the eugenicist RWGs that founded the early environmentalist organizations, you really don't GAF that your own "pop control" ideology is directly out of that era.they dont even bother to recycle the cardboard from the trees now gone. they. dont. GAF.
70s feminism will never get us out of state-sponsored breeder identity politics.With the Supreme Court seemingly poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and anti-choice activists plotting to implement a nationwide “heartbeat bill” that will ban abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, the “mastermind” of the heartbeat bill strategy is running for Congress and plotting to use the strategy behind the Texas’ 2021 draconian “heartbeat bill” to target schools that teach about LGBTQ issues.
Janet Porter, a longtime right-wing conspiracy theorist and religious-right activist, appeared on fellow radical right-wing activist Dave Daubenmire’s “Pass The Salt” program last month. Porter told Daubenmire that she hopes to take a lesson from the law passed in Texas that allows anyone to sue a clinic, doctor, or any person who facilitates an abortion for up to $10,000 and apply the same strategy to LGBTQ issues in public schools. The Texas law has had a chilling effect on reproductive centers in the state, and many have stopped providing abortions all together.
“Here’s what we learned in the state of Texas,” Porter said. “The motivation of abortion is money, and if we can take away that motivation; in other words, give citizens the right to sue any abortionist, anybody who aids or abets in the abortion—that’s the clinic escort, it’s the receptionist, it’s the insurance company—any citizen can sue for a violation of the Texas heartbeat law, and they’ll get $10,000 if they win their suit.”
I love trees, flora, plants. I just find eugenicist-based "pop control" environmentalism to be eliminationist by design. They don't even hide it.ZoWie wrote: ↑Wed May 04, 2022 11:22 pm Something has to convert all the CO2 made by human respiration and all our various combustion-based technologies back into oxygen. Trees do a nice job. So do other various flora.
Humans and trees can coexist, but for this to happen we have to stop letting the Koch Bros, spawn of the same rich asshole who helped Robert Welch start the John Birch Society, clearcut the planet. It would also be nice if we hadn't taken as much compressed carbon and decayed organic matter out of the ground and burned it, which made an existing natural cycle worse, leading to bark beetles and desiccation with resulting crown fires. But hey, one problem at a time.
