Babies At The End Of The World

Racist reproductive policies have laid a trap for all of us.

“The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don’t know what is happening.”
― Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

In 1991 a 27-year-old woman was given an offer she could not refuse. Darlene Johnson had caught her six-year-old smoking a cigarette. Darlene, a mother of four in California, had previously caught her other four-year-old child sticking a wire hanger in an electrical outlet. She decided to give this six-year-old child the same punishment she had given the other child for the wire hanger incident. A spanking with an electrical cord and a belt. The 27-year-old pled guilty to 3 felony accounts of child abuse after the incident was discovered. Now, facing prison time as a young woman eight months pregnant with her next child, she was presented with a choice.

A) Seven years in prison

or

B) 1 year in prison with three years of probation.

Now most of us with the capacity to count would choose B or see it as the way better option. Darlene Johnson needed parenting classes, community help, supervision, and help desperately to learn how to parent the children she already had. Any amount of prison time was going to deeply mess with the kids and further shatter this family.

So obviously you choose option B, right?

There was a catch though. When I first heard the requirement my first thought was that this judge was being unreasonably, independently cruel, and malicious. And maybe that was the case. But cruelty (even when it is mind-blowingly, seemingly senseless) operates on purpose. Cruelty can be about making someone an example to a group, justified on the basis of who someone is and how they fail to measure up to a standard or to flex power on another.

Darlene Johnson knew if she picked option B, she would also be required to undergo the Norplant birth control insertion.

On one hand, this maybe doesn’t sound that bad. This was an overwhelmed mother who now had a run-in with the law on child abuse charges! She had kids that could possibly now be wards of the state! And is Norplant all that bad? Don’t we all have to make sacrifices for the kids we already have and face consequences for our poor choices?

Norplant was approved by the FDA in 1990, a year before Darlene had to make her choice. Six surgically implanted rods in the upper arm dispensed slowly a contraceptive called progestin levonorgestrel. It would last for five years before the rods had to be replaced. Norplant suppressed ovulation, thickened the cervical mucus to keep sperm from entering, and prevented the uterine environment from being hospitable for conception.

If you’ve been on this journey with me through medical history for even a short period of time, it is not going to surprise you that the Population Council that developed Norplant, a foundation in New York, researched and tested contraceptives on poor women of color internationally. When Norplant came home after being tested on poor women of color, it was selectively marketed to poor women of color and low-income women. More than a million low-income women have implanted Norplant in their arms. It has especially high uses in African-American communities. Young Black girls were the demographic, with fifty thousand kits implanted in two years (1991-1992) in girls aged 13-19.

There was a reason for this selective marketing, but it wasn’t based in fact. The old enslaver myth that circulated for generations to let White men off the hook for raping, harassing, and initiating sexual relations with Black women, a mere idea that Black girls were very promiscuous was what led to the marketing push. The Population Foundation was out to stop an imaginary proliferation of Black babies, when in 1992 73 percent of the 13-year-old Black girls were virgins and 50 percent of the 17-year-old Black girls were virgins. To boot, that year White girls had more teenage pregnancies! And, the entire American teen birth rate had been rapidly declining, with young Black girls leading the way. The Norplant War on Black Promiscuity was unnecessary, but effective in helping push the narrative of Bad Black Mothers into yet another generation’s consciousness. Withholding the conception of future children from Black women was held up as the cure for Black trauma and systemic inequalities instituted by White people for White social supremacy. If Black people then had more children and experienced hardship, the blame was once again shifted to them and not White Supremacy. Conception as a means of reducing the so called “underclass” was the 1990s reboot of soft eugenics. Harriet Washington notes that it was not about saying “Black” or “inferior” but about bemoaning the “inner city” and the “urban poor” which stood in for “The Black Women” problem. Research and foundations were dedicated to reducing poverty not by examining or restructuring economic powers, ot the form of capitalism that only served a constellation of mammoth corporations, or even historic economic measures designed to cripple Black families, but by reducing the Black population as a whole. Poverty and teen pregnancy was linked without any real data or structural analysis.

This is where I would like to look square in the eye a vein of this dynamic that has played out in my own social and religious community: The removal of Brown and Black children from their communities due to poverty. I would not dare speak to every adoption case or individual, but across countries and states, there is a real reckoning with the multi million dollar industry of fighting poverty by removing children from their birth parents. Thousands of people raise millions of dollars to foster international adoptions, with companies and agencies and organizations working like small armies to mobilize and provide a pathway out for these kids. But this is also a money making industry, and all this money is not directed into understanding and supporting initiatives that would end the need for parents to choose between their children being put in fields, trafficked, or adopted by wealthier families whose countries accumulated that wealth through colonial power. Swooping in and cherry picking children to experience the American Dream is a choice. Mobilizing every power to remove instead of advocate is a choice that might be right in some circumstances, but not all. And it fully plays into the idea that the poverty and dire straights these people are in is an issue of bad parenting or choices that could be rectified by the removal of their children. While I understand that that is not the heart, attitude, or vision of the vast majority of people adopting from other countries, it is nevertheless their action. The advocacy extends to a small percentage of children, and not the poverty system built brick by brick by imperial power. This obsession with rescuing children from poverty across border is magically allergic to discussions of poverty at home. Class systems and how wealth shields some children and not others are typically off the table as problems to consider.

Years before Darlene was asked to give her children up or give up her ability to have children, Native American women had been presented with papers by doctors from the the US government health care agencies that had been set up in and around their communities. The papers explained that their current economic situation was due to the large families, and that by having less children they could get out of poverty. Thousands of Native women were sterilized under a multi year campaign. How does not having another child provide the children you already have with access to affordable food, education, healthcare and wealth? Especially when your community and its resources has already been systematically stripped and sold for parts? When every access point to those goods has been legally and economically blocked for you? How does one less child undo several generations of oppression and theft and genocide?

And how exactly were Darlene’s children being helped here? Darlene needed parenting remediation, support, and training to care for her kids and keep them out of foster care. Playing the devil’s advocate, anyone can understand how she might be less stressed with less children. But simply having two children is enough to stress a parent out. The focus of her judgement should have been on protecting the existing kids in the most rigorous way possible. And in the wider context of the US government blaming and explaining away societal dysfunction as a reproduction problem, this judgement fit right in.

Darlene had quite a battle ahead of her. When she asked if Norplant was safe for her to use, she was told it was. When Darlene discovered that Norplant should not be used in women with two of her conditions -hypertension and diabetes- she rightly changed her mind. The district attorneys and the ACLU itself urged the judge Howard Broadman to release her from her agreement. He would not. Harriet Washington concludes this story by saying that any ensuing potential legal battle was culled when Darlene Johnson was jailed for using drugs in violation of her probation. Darlene’s case was technically closed, but it opened up a legal loophole of “coercive contraception” and sterilization through the American legal system.

The ability to procreate is considered a legal, sacred civil right. After many nightmare situations involving women of all colors who were legally sterilized through eugenic boards for “moral ineptitude”, “imbecilic behavior” and “being bad stock”, the 1942 Supreme Court ruling on an Oklahoma law protected this right to procreate. Yet researchers and legal experts have consistently found patterns where coercive contraception and legal targeting of women of color for crimes committed across class and ethnic groups. Black women who use and abuse drugs are ten times more likely to be given sentences with birth control stipulations than White women who do the same drug crimes. Child Protective Services are also 72 percent more likely to remove children from Black and Latina women than White women for again, the same crimes. Black and White women have the same rates of drug abuse, yet year after year the policing and the child removal services are disparate. Women of color are considered “better” to give birth in prisons than their White counterparts.

It is not that everyone in policing or at CPS or any of these medical agencies all get together and scheme to be racist. It’s that by not critically examining the lens White Supremacy gave us, by which we view Black, Brown, and immigrant mothers, we end up replicating its worse prejudices. We take social systems and economic context off the table. We don’t question why we assume these women are “tougher”. We assume there are “too many” of “those kids”. We are quick to withhold holistic services and assume the worst. We think “these people” are fated, destined, or more capable to withstand pain and hardship.

I know that is yet another unfortunate truth in a series of depressing truths that I have been laying out here on one Substack among thousands. Aside from a personal conviction that you should care about the plight of other people, I’ll add the selfish reason. Or the democratic republic one.

You’re really only as free as the most policed or imprisoned woman in America.

There is this idea that government theorists ask us to hold in our heads when we are voting or discussing what we should legally be allowed to do to each other in a civil society. We know that no legal system ever works perfectly, and mistakes can be made. Or that even we as citizens could find ourselves in situations where we make decisions and choices that have us facing the law. What kind of law do we want to face? How free are you if your sacred rights disappear in dark corners of prisons? How sacred are those rights if they only exist outside of prison walls? What actually helps rehabilitate someone or facilitates restorative justice? And what do we do with laws on the books that only get thrown at women of color?

As much we might resist this, we’re all only one natural disaster, mistake, choice, or economic event away from being in a situation like the women mentioned here today. There is also this idea that the current underclass is a static, fixed group of people. But history is a great reminder that the social identifiers we use to stratify ourselves are ultimately malleable. When America turns “tan” (as it will by 2050) the issue might be less about obvious “Whites” and “Blacks” and more about shades of Browns. Everything we use to justify the power we wield over each other is ultimately just a fictional story about real power, money, and social standing. The tables are always turning, the story is always morphing, and the social, political, and economic power remains clenched between the fingers of whoever sells the best justification for the concentration of that power. We have seen in history specific ethnic groups “become White” overnight to increase voting blocks. We see in societies from antiquity on instituting hierarchies both blatantly and subtly. The American allergy to discussing class structures prevents us from examining how our particular caste system influences our experiences with the law and why. This is a blind spot that allows for injustice to moulder and grow.

In the novel “FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD”, Louise Erdrich envisions a tomorrow in which a young woman has to navigate her pregnancy amid a climate crisis that has made her unborn child a commodity to be monitored by the state. As we are now starting to think about just how badly Climate change will negatively affect pregnancies, birth rates and the entire economy of birth, it would do us good to think about what legal reproductive injustice lingers now, because it will only get worse. What will we do to those who are indigenous or Black and pregnant, the people who make up the majority of those at risk for climate migration and dislocation? Who will justify taking their children? Who will justify their sterilization as an “answer” as opposed to examining the ongoing corporate greed that is responsible for climate disasters?

Who gets to be pregnant, who gets to stay pregnant, who is sterilized, how is monitored and how is not the stuff of science fiction. Pregnancy, childbirth, and property have always been intertwined. The sterilization abuses at the border are just one example of this. Times of crisis tend to bring out the worst in existing inequalities, and the society is only going to grow more invested in the impact of a pregnancy.

Who that will impact tomorrow and how, is entirely up to us and what we choose to continue to tolerate today.