"Killing the Black Body", by Dorothy Roberts really does show the darker sides of birth control. While Margaret Sanger began the birth control movement as a positive movement to expand reproductive options for women, I soon learned from reading this article that it was marked by racism from the very beginning. Specifically, eugenicists advocated the control of reproduction in order to improve society, and they were advocating the reproductive control of the blacks and the poor, not the rich and the whites. Sterilization was used as a remedy for social problems and was forced upon countless numbers of Black women. It became so popular and so common in many areas such as Mississippi that is became known as the Mississippi appendectomy, which greatly reminded me of the mass effort of sterilization of poor Puerto Rican women. This started me thinking about where else in our world are groups of women targeted as a whole. Maybe they are not sterilized, but they are the recipients of birth control testing or other types of fertility procedures. I began to do a little research on the always-reliable google and this is what I was able to find.
In Tibet: In 1990, the local radio station in Qinghai announced that "over 87,000 women had been sterilized, about ten percent of women of child-bearing age." It was unclear whether these operations had been voluntary, but the same broadcast announced, "Effective and forceful measures have also been adopted to strengthen family planning work."
Between 1965-71, an estimated 1 million women in Brazil had been sterilized
Between 1963-65, more than 40,000 women in Colombia had been sterilized
The first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics was the United States.
After finding just some of this information I knew that there was so much more out there, so many groups of individuals are being targeted when I really do not believe that population control is the problem, but rather the economy. I think that if we are able to improve the global economy then we will be able to better care for all of the individuals in the world and not trick or force women into giving up their right to reproduce.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Every time I read another statistic about forced sterilization, it really shocks me. I feel like all the information about this topic has been swept under the rug pretty successfully so we can pretend like the U.S. never participated in a eugenics movement. The magnitude of women who unwillingly underwent surgery around the world is unbelievable. I was looking for some more info about sterilization within the U.S. and I found a really interesting article from 2007 about Indiana - the first state to authorize the sterilization of confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles.
... About 64,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized during the period, as 31 states followed Indiana's lead. Today, 10 states still have eugenic sterilizations laws on the books, although they are not used.
And as far as consent was concerned:
Board hearings usually were perfunctory affairs where a stray nod of the patient's head might be jotted down as a form of consent. Often the consent was not freely given, such as in the case of a 28-year-old woman who met with the school's board of trustees in May 1943 and was asked about the sterilization procedure:
Q: Do you want that operation performed?
A: No.
Q: Do you want to go home?
A: Yes.
Q: Would you like to have this operation so you can go home?
A: Yes, I'll take anything to go home.
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/07/09/prsa0709.htm
I've also been thinking a lot about fads and precedents being set in medicine. It seems like once a procedure is carried out enough times, people stop worrying about whether or not it is ethical.
Post a Comment