1:35am July 11, 2013

“Forced sterilization has always targeted people considered the least valuable in our society,” Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body, told me in a phone interview. “In the early 20th Century, that meant white immigrants, by the mid-20th century, that meant poor women, black and Puerto Rican women, and other women of color whose bodies were not seen as fit to be protected by the state.”

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Forced Sterilizations and the Future of the Women’s Movement (via notime4yourshit)

this is why i teach Dorothy Roberts’ book (Killing the Black Body) alongside Andrea Smith’s (Conquest)—these sterilizations are part of a much larger story of genocide in both African-American and Native communities. i think it’s notable that one of the physicians responsible for the unapproved sterilizations of woman inmates in California prisons told the press (in response to a question about the $147, 460 he charged for the procedures), “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money…compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children – as they procreated more.” The presumption that the predominately brown & black women in California’s prison system (a) don’t want future children and are poor parents (b) are hypersexual animals incapable of utilizing more temporary birth control measures should they elect to do so © are going to go on and be welfare queens and ‘leeches on the government’ (rather than human beings who face discrimination in the workplace due to their race, gender, & criminal record, who also deal with inadequate childcare and rehabilitation resources) is totally dehumanizing.

i also push people to think of the term “forced sterilization" beyond the realm of strictly tubal ligation, and put this in context of histories of environmental racism. for example, in the 1970s the US Forest Service sprayed herbicides on some Native communities in Northern California, with the full knowledge that these chemicals are toxic and cause reproductive failure; when spontaneous miscarriages continued for years, Native activists tried to hold the USFS accountable and demand they stop spraying—the USFS responded by saying that the miscarriages *must* be due to widespread drug addiction, not their chemicals. the US government KNEW their actions were causing miscarriages and fertility issues in Native communities, and continued this practice for years—how is that not forced sterilization too?

(via nitanahkohe)

I’m always careful to mention race, class, and disability as intertwined in that part of history. As in ableism would (in addition to disabled people) be used against poor women and people of color, classism would (in addition to poor people) be used against people of color and disabled people, racism would (in addition to people of color) be used against poor people and disabled people. They were that intertwined during the eugenics movement.

It’s odd to me when people forget to mention disabled people, because the entire idea that poor meant disabled and of color meant disabled (as well as disabled meant disabled) was a foundation the movement was built upon. As well as disabled people being the other main target of the movement. Many ideas from which persist until today.

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