The Pill and Black Genocide
The context around an ongoing accusation.
When it comes to birth control, what constitutes a genocidal act?
When the birth control pill arrived on the scene it was largely hailed as an advancement for all people, decoupling reproduction from sex. No more worries about children!
But what about the people who worried that there were not enough of their children? Who had up to that point, as a group, been not only politically targeted but under an intense legal and economic system that controlled their reproduction and resulting kin?
In Article D from Resolution 260 (III) of Section A of the United Nations General Assembly of 1948 there is a prohibition on imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group.
Margaret Sanger’s legacy is largely wrapped up in her support of the birth control pill. In the decades to come after her, the sexual revolution and women’s movement in the U.S. would deeply alter the political landscape and reality for all its citizens.
When I first typed out that last sentence I used the word “radically” instead of “deeply”. But in the time between when I started drafting this piece and the time I came back to it, the history that followed the birth control pill is not what anyone could reasonably describe as “radical”. The decades of continued, government-sponsored initiatives to systemically deny Native women and immigrant women reproductive autonomy and the economic system’s absolute refusal to reverse institutional pay inequality on the basis of sex meant that the society was deeply changed, but not radically altered.
The effects of generations of intentional legislation instituting White Supremacy had not been meaningfully combated, so Black families found this modern wonder to be a double-edged sword. Now that their Black children could not be sold for stolen labor, there was a concerted effort to make sure less of them existed. This was largely the work of Eugenicists, concerned parents who feared “race mixing”, and health care providers who blamed systemic public health failures on individuals.
Of course, there is no one reaction in a very diverse group of people who all happened to fall under the political and social designation that is known as “Blackness”. A few reactions and positions we know historically were prevalent are however directly tied into general fears and concerns that rise from the very history we have been reviewing this year in Harriet Washington’s research. Because regardless of what tribe or nation these African Americans had originated from, the law made them all Black. That Blackness is what was the determining factor to the kind of health care they had access to.
Many Black people found that the public health clinics that intentionally moved into Black, segregated areas to push the Pill were Anti-Black. They experienced racism in these centers that ostensibly existed for their health and sniffed out this virulent hope that fewer Black children and mixed Black children would come into existence because of the Pill’s distribution. These centers were sometimes (or in many places often) direct descendants of the Sanger clinics and her Eugenics movement, which existed to push forward a “clean Eugenic” society. That memory loomed over the Black neighborhoods, alongside passed-down stories and ongoing experiences of Medical abuse at the hands of doctors and nurses.
Other members of the population welcomed the Pill, with pastors and beloved leaders encouraging people to use it even though the motivations of the White medical providers were suspect. There was a second understanding, that this country was a long way off from reversing the effect of White Supremacy on Black people’s ability to own property, build wealth and security, vote without getting lynched or beat up, have access to nonabusive healthcare, quality education, or representation if sexually assaulted. There are documents of women understanding that the providers handing out birth control were racist, but also the harsh reality of trying to raise multiple children in a society that did not protect them. Having some control over when they had children was a new reality for Black women in America.
When Black women arrived to be enslaved in America, they had zero legal protection against sexual assault and rape by the White men who enslaved or transported them. Any children resulting from those attacks automatically belonged to the rapist.
When the institution of Slavery ended, it became widely known that instead of worrying about one enslaver who owned you, you had to worry about all White men, because legally Black women were not “rapeable”. It varied across states but states that detailed the crime of rape did so explicitly for women considered to be White. Courts seldom prosecuted rapists with Black survivors. Black women and their bodies had never been protected since the foundation of the country and certainly were not in the generations to follow. This awareness of having absolutely no recourse for rape was part of the cultural memory that led Black women to -against their doubts of the racist medical culture- accept risky, dangerous, and often abusive birth control methods and experimentation. When you have to choose between a bad thing and a worse thing, you often pick the bad thing. The retroactive blaming and shaming of Black women for participating in what some argue to be genocide or political efforts to keep the state and general society out of the reproductive decisions doesn’t account for the context in which these women made their choices.
In a similar blame game, some point out that some Native American women signed off on some of the sterilization procedures. While that is true, what is also true is that a large coercive campaign was made to persuade these women that the dire economic situation they were in was a result of their reproduction and family size. This was simply not true. Various Native populations experienced economic strain and poverty because their generational wealth, land, and economy had been forcibly and violently dismantled by the US government. Ceasing to have one more baby was not the answer to their poverty. It however was the answer to clamping down and stamping out the Native populations, which was for many generations an aim of the US government. Continuing into the 70s, government health agencies successfully sterilized thousands of Native women, long after the laws had changed. Rendering large swaths of diverse Native people sterile during a liberation period for women and an ongoing sexual revolution the US government betrayed a common irony of the time. Over and over again, many social advances first only benefit women considered to be White, as the racist underpinnings and laws remain firmly intact while the culture mentally expands and moves on. Where was the liberation of choice to have children on their own terms for Native and Black women? For immigrant women?
When social activist Donald Bogue went to survey significant Black populations in 1970, he found a good rate of approval among Black women for the Pill. 80 percent approved and 75 percent of the women actively used it. There remained a deep distrust and desire to avoid sterilization, but the public contraceptive centers were now welcomed.
However, Harriet Washington points out in her careful research that the proliferation of the centers fell under the U.N. Definition of genocide but because they were embraced by the population it couldn’t be pinned as genocide. There were scores of far more pressing African-American health issues at the time that were direct results of generations of White Supremacy and medical abuse. There were terrible infectious control systems, chronic poor nutrition, high infant mortality, little mental health resources, and poor quality healthcare. Addressing those issues would have helped this population flourish and recover from the instability that Slavery and post-slavery law had carefully designed to keep them in. And yet the least pressing issue -birth control- was heavily, intentionally, and meticulously funded. The number of well-stocked, well-endowed, robust birth control centers specifically placed in African-American populations exploded. The public health focus was birth control and reducing birth rates. This betrayed the priorities of the US government and caused much tension among the Black communities depending on which side you fell. Some sought to remove the clinics and others to defend them. Others insisted on creating a reproduction ethic that gave women and families the right to bear their children when they wanted to and in a health system that supported them. This would dovetail with Native activists who also began to push and seek the right to have children in safe, clean environments and have healthy full-term pregnancies not troubled by systemic abuse and poverty.
These things are always more complicated than they appear. The more we dig into the history the harder it gets to make the story of bodily autonomy in the US clear. In any given interaction, we sometimes find pro-Black men seeking to limit Black women and their decisions for the sake of being pro-Black, and not including what it means to be pro-Woman. We have pro-black women partnering with anti-black healthcare in order to achieve their goals and protect their children or anti-Black healthcare providers partnering with pro-Family religious leaders in Black communities. It is tangled with conflicting priorities and ideas about how to address what was clear: the effect of White Supremacy on everyone. As the development of the IUD and sterilization atrocities that still haunt everyone continued, the story only got more complicated, as all women are continually affected by medical care that does not take their pain into consideration. Later accusations of birth control testing are muddied with healthcare researchers’ real and documented hopes to give the women what they wanted.
I hope this little piece of history is a reminder to think carefully and speak with humility when discussing a marginalized population’s response and feelings around the topics of reproductive health. We cannot dismiss real concerns and fears in a vacuum. If anything, this history serves as an invitation to critically examine why we believe what we believe about the politics and economics of reproduction in any given society. It is also a reminder to pause before we blame individuals and their family size without getting the whole picture.