Killing the Black Body and the Pamphlet on Overpopulation

I found the discussion during last Tuesday's class to be particularly interesting. The article "Killing the Black Body" presented a completely different side to the eugenics movement and to Planned Parenthood. I have always viewed Planned Parenthood as a great and necessary resource especially for young woman. I believe that it plays a valuable role in our society where young girls may only be receiving information on abstinence only sex education or come from backgrounds that are incestuous or that just don't support premarital sex. However, reading how Planned Parenthood came in to being was shocking. After learning the history of its developments it is clear now why often times the presence of Planned Parenthood in primarily minority neighborhoods is resented. 

Sanger is a very complicated figure and her involvement with the eugenics movement was a disreputable way to achieve her ends. I found it to be very interesting how the Women's Liberation groups at the time didn't want to associate themselves with Sanger. Sanger was advocating for birth control for all women and this would allow women to enjoy sex and find fulfillment outside of a traditional caregiver/mother role. Sanger's ideas are very modern and they are ideas that I attribute to the modern women's rights movement, but it is interesting how leading women of the day rejected these ideas. The eugenics movement that Sanger then turned to did not support Sanger's view of birth control for all women they believed that certain women should be forced to be sterilized if they were though to be "genetically unfit."

The eugenics movement is a horrible distortion of science. It allows people's racists ideas to be expressed in a "scientific" and therefore socially acceptable manner. The eugenics movement in America was trying to eliminate all "undesirable" groups of society. So anyone who wasn't white, male, middle class, and who didn't follow the moral codes of the day was a target of forced sterilization. This effort to sterilize "unfit" people was mainly directed towards poor white Southerns and African Americans. Both of these groups had no way of defending themselves since they had no power in society and both groups failed to meet the ideals of the day. This forced sterilization clearly resonates with the film La operacion. Also, another unifying theme is the idea of the ideal. In Puerto Rico the perfect family was a family of four, this discouraged big families, in America during the early 20th century (and still today) the ideal family was mentally and physically fit and white. Both of these ideals further oppresses minority groups and makes it all the easier to dehumanize these different and "unacceptable" members of society.

Another interesting point that is brought up with sterilization is the idea of population control. This is the reason that was used in Puerto Rico to sterilize women and it was also an idea invoked in Roberts's article. This idea of population control is one that I still commonly hear as a reason not to have big families. The pamphlet "10 Reason to Rethink 'Overpopulation'" does a great job refuting a lot of the commonly held stereotypes about overpopulation. One of the points that I found most interesting was that the richest fifth of society consumes 66 times more resources than the poorer fifth! However, the point that ties in best with forced sterilization is that the population boom is over and also, that the world can handle more people. So governments and other programs need to stop scaring people into having less children. It is a basic and individual right to have children or not to have children and no one should be allowed to make that decision for you!