Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Although the Progressive Era aimed to improve social conditions for all Americans, racism denied Black women access to certain programs, while other programs became tools of oppression. Roberts notes that the system initially denied Black women access to maternity welfare programs yet helped single white mothers who lacked the support of a working husband. The legislation catered to conventional views of white mothers as chaste and honorable. Conversely, lingering stereotypes about Black women as inadequate or neglectful mothers—and as responsible for Black men’s degeneracy—fueled opposition to provide them with similar support.

Society similarly divided Black and white women on matters of birth control. While Black communities had for years practiced birth control in many forms, including folk remedies to avoid pregnancy, it remained a forbidden subject among polite company in white society. The Comstock Law forbade the transmission of birth control information via mail. After birth control became legal, few clinics were available in Black communities, and the existing clinics weren’t always run by Black staff members. Margaret Sanger, like many white people during her time and even now, took a paternalist view of the matter and mistrusted clinics run by Black health care workers. However, Sanger didn’t subscribe to the racist eugenicist idea that Black people were inherently inferior and required sterilization. Instead, she held that their poorer social conditions resulted from ills beyond their control, such as less access to birth control and inadequate employment.

Sterilization efforts continued well into the 1970s. While mandated vasectomies on Black men—usually incarcerated men—occurred, most sterilization procedures involved Black women. The belief that sterilization was best for Black women was rooted in the notion that Black people posed an undue economic burden on American (presumably white) taxpayers.

While eugenicist ideas lost much currency in the 1940s, aspects of these beliefs have lingered. Roberts suggests that reproductive technologies have inadvertently fueled a desire for children who aren’t only white but have features (e.g., blond hair and blue eyes) that signal racial purity. She mentions the more surprising case of a Black woman in Italy with a white husband who opted for a white woman’s egg when conducting IVF. The woman’s rationale was that a white child would have an easier life than the genetic offspring from her and her husband. Similarly, the trend in interracial adoptions equates whiteness to a better quality of life, as white parents sometimes adopt Black children, yet Black parents never adopt white children. The result, in both instances, is a negation of both Black life and the transmission of Black cultural characteristics, based on the view that Black identity is subpar. This belief is rooted in eugenicist thinking.

Alongside the rise in Norplant and Depo-Provera campaigns aimed at Black women was a widespread concern about rising rates of teen pregnancy in the US. The media often fueled this concern—not only through news reports but also through television shows that featured teen moms or those who feared they’d become pregnant after a sexual encounter. The response to high teen pregnancy rates in poor Black communities—particularly one in Baltimore, which Roberts mentions—was to provide teens with Norplant implants. However, Norplant became the subject of bad publicity due to its ties to sterilization campaigns, the health care community’s lack of preparedness for the birth control’s side effects, and complications in removing the implants. Thereafter, Depo-Provera and contraceptive vaccines became the new responses to this social problem.

As Roberts points out, if the nation’s response to teen pregnancy had been preventive, young people would have had little need for long-term birth control. Roberts mentions that Western European countries offer teens comprehensive sex education as well as access to contraceptives, particularly condoms, which have helped to keep their teen pregnancy rates much lower than those in the US. Moreover, long-term birth control is an extreme solution, Roberts notes, because teens usually have sex more sporadically than adults. The focus on long-term birth control in Black communities more likely resulted from a lingering eugenicist belief that children of Black teen moms would become social burdens, living on welfare for generations. Supporting this notion, long-term birth control wasn’t advertised as heavily to white teens. Roberts notes that pregnancy among Black teens doesn’t always indicate cyclical poverty and degradation. She cites a study that focused on a group of Baltimore-based Black teen moms who successfully raised their children, graduated from high school, and secured full-time employment. She emphasizes that, contrary to what the media has encouraged us to believe, teen motherhood doesn’t mean that a young woman’s life will remain in stasis or even be unusually difficult. Their pregnancies and childrearing would have been much easier, Roberts repeatedly notes, if they had easier access to life’s basic needs—good healthcare, adequate shelter, and nutritional food.