I’ve always thought that the oppression of women through reproductive rights manifested itself though denial of contraceptives and abortions, but never did it occur to me that the opposite would be true. I know that eugenics was practiced in India and Nazi Germany, but the notion that it occurred in this country as recently as the seventies is nauseating. It seems that in the early years of the United States black slaves were politically powerless and treated as commodities, so whites didn’t worry about their population, and in fact they encouraged/forced childbirth the way one would fertilize a crop. In later years, non whites have won a great deal of social and political power, so much so that they have become a threat to the white majority, some of whom now seem to want to neutralize the threat they pose by diminishing their numbers. I remember one account in the case of Brown vs. The Board of Education when black student were brought into a previously all white school for the first time, one white woman was reported to be screaming ‘Got your birth control pills?’ at the black students. I think this all sheds light on what it truly means to be racist, or not to be a racist. It is easy enough for a white person who lives in an all white community and never has to compete with black people to say they bear no animosity towards black people. It is only when a person does come in contact with people of other races and does have to compete with them, and possibly lose a job or a promotion to a person of another race that their character is truly tested.
White women are pressured to bear children, non white children are pressured not to. Both groups are subject to a template of an ideal America forced upon them by a small, but powerful sector of the population that seems to want white women forced back into a more traditional domestic role and seems to want the absence of black people as a whole, now that they no longer serve as commodities. This conflict threatens to pit white women against black and Hispanic women in the fight for reproductive rights as both may resent the position the other holds in the struggle and may feel that the other group is taking their position for granted. The goal of course is not unchecked childbirth or complete sterility, but for individual choice, something that men have far too long believed that women are incapable of making for themselves. The whole situation is nauseating and enlightening, and gives me a great deal of sympathy and understanding for black women in America.
Amanda Wright
