African-American Women and the Reproductive Rights Movement

Felder 11

Lucie Felder

Professor Chatelain

History 285

15 December 2014

African-American Women and The Reproductive Rights Movement:

Sterilization Abuse in Southern States

Since the Civil War, African-American women have endured a struggle for reproductive justice against an agenda of eugenics, deeply rooted in the view that black women are irresponsible mothers. Reproduction has long been an ideological battleground upon which men, women, and the state have competed for control over women’s reproductive decision making.[1] African-American women in particular have had to contend not only with men and the state, but also with other women to bring about recognition of their historical experience of reproductive disempowerment; specifically White women in leadership during the Reproductive Rights Movement.

African-American women successfully drew public attention to their disproportionate experience of coerced sterilization in the 1960s-1970s by publicizing incidents of involuntary sterilization, like that of Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf. Their activism highlighted the complexity of the phrase “reproductive freedom,” expanding the conversation of the Reproductive Rights Movement to include the many instances of coerced sterilization in several Southern states. These women demonstrated that reproductive autonomy includes not only the choice to terminate a pregnancy, but also the power to control one’s own reproductive capabilities.

The history of legal sterilization dates back to the 1920s, to a time when women were institutionalized for being “feebleminded.” By this time, many Americans had embraced “the theory that intelligence and other personality traits [were] genetically determined and therefore inherited…”[2] Sir Francis Galton pioneered this ideology, referring to it as eugenics. Galton argued, “since intelligence and character are transmitted by descent, society should take steps to encourage the procreation of people of superior stock.”[3] This notion of increasing the reproduction of certain groups of people gave rise to “scientific racism.”[4]

According to Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body, “racism provided the theoretical framework for eugenic thinking.”[5] Indeed, eugenic theory influenced the development of the incorrect understanding that races are biologically distinct groups. Further, races were also thought of as being “marked by inherited attributes of inferiority and superiority.”[6] Many Americans accepted this idea that social characteristics were heritable and could be attributed to race. As a consequence, sterilization began to be used as a remedy for social problems.

American Eugenicists advocated for compulsory sterilization as a means to eliminate the “socially inadequate” members of society.[7] Public officials argued that mental and social inadequacies were such a threat to the welfare of society that sacrificing young women’s right to bear children was done “for the greater interest of the body politic.”[8] Though not a race, but rather a group of people, the physically and mentally disabled were the first victims of compulsory sterilization. However, as demonstrated in the 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court Case, mental disability was arbitrarily defined.

Carrie Buck was 17 years old when she became pregnant as a result of rape.[9] She was subsequently institutionalized for “feeblemindedness” and later sterilized for being “mentally deficient.”[10] Her case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the State of Virginia, affirming the state’s constitutional right to sterilize people with hereditary defects. Despite the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the sterilization order, there was no reliable evidence that either Buck or her daughter were mentally deficient. During the years following the Buck v. Bell decision, “the number of states with compulsory sterilization laws grew to thirty.”[11]

State legislatures rarely informed the public about the implementation of eugenic sterilization laws. In fact, “when states did inform the public, educational materials consistently portrayed the typical sterilized subject as an adult married woman, suffering from poverty, overwork, multiple pregnancies, and poor health…”[12] While this portrait of a typical sterilization victim is far from accurate, it demonstrates how sterilization was used to target women of certain profiles as unsuccessful citizens. According to Susan K. Cahn, author of Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age, constituencies who would have opposed policies regarding sterilization “lacked the political strength to wage effective opposition.”[13]

Between the 1920s and the 1970s, the demographic of eugenic sterilization victims changed dramatically from the so-called feebleminded women of mental institutions to the African-American women of the welfare system. Throughout this period, the U.S. economy industrialized and Southern states no longer needed to maintain a ready supply of cheap, agricultural labor. As a result, black women’s fertility was now seen as costing rather than enriching.

By the 1950s, state governments had turned their attention away from eliminating the mentally and physically disabled, and began to focus their attention towards curbing “the reproductive capacity of those single black women receiving welfare or other state services.”[14] U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare officials sought to control women’s reproduction by coercing them into accepting eugenic sterilization as a condition for receiving welfare payments for them and their children.[15]

By midcentury, economic dependency had replaced mental deficiency as the main criterion for sterilization.[16] “As part of New Deal relief programs, federal law required Southern states to extend welfare payments to all of its needy citizens.”[17] However, by this time, the percentage of whites in need of economic assistance had significantly declined. This meant that black women constituted the majority of welfare recipients. This “presence made them increasingly vulnerable to the prejudices and biases of state providers.”[18] In fact, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina “approved 1,620 sterilizations between 1960 and 1968…1,023 were performed on black women and nearly 56% on those under 20 years of age.”[19] By 1970, women of color were sterilized at over twice the rate of white women.[20] These statistics demonstrate that there were more Black women coercively sterilized under government welfare programs by the 1970s than feebleminded people under the 1920s eugenic laws.[21]

The ideology behind sterilizing women of color on welfare was rooted in the stereotype that black women were “dangerous mothers.”[22] According to Jennifer Nelson, author of Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement, “there is a belief in the United States that poor women of color should not reproduce in large numbers because they and their children are considered dangerous and burdensome to society.”[23] This belief is the eugenic force behind regulating Black women’s childbearing to achieve social objectives.[24] Interestingly, coercive strategies went unnoticed for a long period of time because they were often disguised by social and cultural factors. Poverty, limited access to health care, lack of education, and the inability to speak English influenced women of color to “choose” sterilization over other methods of birth control.[25]

In 1973, two young, black sisters named Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf increased public awareness of this issue of sterilization abuse. The Relf sisters were only teenagers when they were sterilized without their knowledge or consent at the federally funded Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in Alabama. Mrs. Relf, who had six children and was living on welfare at the time, spent most of her life sharecropping in Alabama; she had never learned to read or write. Mrs. Relf had taken her two daughters to the clinic to receive Depo-Provera shots, a form of birth control now known to cause cancer. When the clinic discontinued Depo-Provera treatments, Mrs. Relf was unaware that she had “consented” to her daughters’ sterilization. In fact, “the contents [of the documents she signed] were never described to her.”[26] Caseworkers at the clinic diagnosed the Relf sisters as “mentally retarded,” in order to legally justify the sterilization.[27] However, there was no evidence that these women were mentally deficient, or even sexually active, at the time of this procedure.

In the aftermath of the publicity that exposed the Relf sisters’ case, many women came forth with “equally outrageous stories.”[28] Nial Ruth Cox filed a suit against the state of North Carolina eight years after “officials had threatened to discontinue her family’s welfare payments if she refused to submit to surgical sterilization.”[29] As a result, a multinational group of activists formed the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA) in New York City.[30] The group conducted research into the government’s racist population-control policies, exposing to the public the disproportionately high numbers of Black and Native American women who had been sterilized since the 1940s.

The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) also brought attention to the failure of “sterilization regulations to protect public assistance recipients from threats that they would lose their welfare funds if they declined a sterilization procedure.”[31] Subsequently, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) issued new regulations that prohibited “federally funded sterilization of any incompetent persons without their ‘un-coerced’ consent.”[32] However, a survey of teaching hospitals in 1975 conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “discovered that 40 percent of those institutions were not even aware of these regulations issued by HEW. Only 30 percent of the hospitals examined by the ACLU were even attempting to comply with the guidelines.”[33]

In addition to scrutinizing the government’s racist population control policies, African-American women introduced advocacy against sterilization abuse into the Reproductive Rights Movement of the 1980s. Women of color called for an alternative definition of reproductive freedom. While the emphasis of white women’s activist work was pro-legal abortion, women of color argued that they also need “access to safe, effective birth control methods as well as protection from coercive birth control policies.”[34] African-American women argued that they were in need of better social services and that they deserved the right to raise their children “out of poverty.”[35] These women articulated that coercive sterilization robbed women of “their individual liberty” and violated “principles of bodily integrity and reproductive choice.”[36] African-American women encouraged participants in the Reproductive Rights Movement to reevaluate “what it means to have control over one’s reproductive life” and “autonomy over one’s body and one’s reproductive decision making.”[37]

Surprisingly, middle-class white women were reluctant to engage African-American women in their advocacy against sterilization abuse. This demonstrates an unfortunate truth: in U.S. society, some women are empowered to reproduce while others are not. In fact, as middle-class white women began to pursue high-power, demanding careers, many of them became interested in getting sterilized. It is because of this that some women were hesitant to advocate against the procedure. However, most doctors refused to sterilize white women, even if the women requested the service. This highlights the fact that women, regardless of race, were unable to make their own reproductive choices.

Dorothy Roberts echoes African-American female activists’ criticism of sterilization abuse on welfare recipients:

The abuse of sterilization laws designed to effect eugenic policy demonstrates the potential danger of governmental standards for procreation…Government control of reproduction in the name of science masks racist and classist judgments about who deserves to have children. It is grounded on the premise that people who depart from social norms do not deserve to procreate.[38]

State governments in the South were motivated to limit the reproduction of single mothers on welfare by the stereotype that African-American women are bad mothers. However, officials failed to realize that it wasn’t these women’s genes that kept them in poverty; it was racist institutional and social barriers that prevented their upward mobility.

In the wake of World War II, it is especially alarming that in 1972 the U.S, government funded an estimated 100,000-200,000 sterilizations. “During Hitler’s Germany, incidentally, 250,000 sterilizations were carried out under the Nazis’ Hereditary Health Law.”[39] Similar to the targeting of Jews in Europe, state governments in the U.S. actively encouraged young African-American women to sacrifice future life because of the undesirable social habits these women supposedly embodied.[40]

The history of sterilization abuse in African-American Women’s culture has influenced their eagerness to engage with contemporary birth control services. Women of color are generally suspicious of organizations like Planned Parenthood for fear that its “policies are designed to weaken the black community politically or to wipe it our genetically.”[41] Often, any attempt to interfere with African-American women’s reproductive health is seen as “part of a plan for genocide.”[42] It is important that service-providers are conscious of this history because African-American women deserve to have safe spaces where they can go to learn about protective measures of birth control.

The history of eugenic sterilization demonstrates how African-American women have been manipulated and discouraged from having children, growing their families, and building communities. Eugenic sterilization has had a profound impact on the African-American community. In contemporary society, both African-American males and females are often skeptical of birth control methods and organizations that attempt to offer reproductive services. The African-American community’s historical experience of eugenic sterilization is significant to the larger community of healthcare providers because it influences the success of sexual education programs and services intended to help this demographic. It also prompts a poignant discussion about women’s reproductive health and their lack of autonomy over reproductive decision-making.

Works Cited

Cahn, Susan K. Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Davis, Susan E. Women Under Attack: Victories, Backlash, and the Fight for Reproductive Freedom. Boston: South End Press, 1988.

Dula, Annette and Sara Goering, eds. It Just Ain’t Fair: The Ethics of Health Care for African Americans. Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 1994.

Larson, Edward J. Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Nelson, Jennifer. Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.

Schoen, Johanna. Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Weisbord, Robert G. Genocide? Birth Control and the Black American. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975.

[1] Susan E. Davis, Women Under Attack: Victories, Backlash, and the Fight for Reproductive Freedom (Boston: South End Press, 1988) 7.

[2] Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997) 59.