Just recently, women who were sterilized against their will were awarded $50,000 apiece. Maybe. There’s still a lot that can go wrong, the money is not guaranteed. They were sterilized simply because a board decided they were of unsuitable stock to reproduce. A woman who wanted a family is deprived of that dream and after decades she gets an insulting check? Hell, smokers get more for suicidal behavior. Some of these women were sterilized fifty years ago, is the pain of sterility not even worth a grand a year? Let’s take a quick look at why they were selected for sterilization. For being poor. For being black. For being “willful” or having come from undesirable families. A room full of men sat in judgment on whether certain women should be allowed to conceive. And in the case of over seven thousand women, they decided they were not. By whose authority? The states who allowed this owe a hell of a lot more than $50,000. These women’s lives were forever changed against their will on false pretenses. They get a pittance and a half-assed acknowledgement instead of the apology and promise of a better future for women. Instead, all but maybe 2,000 have died without knowing even this humble victory.
If we were willful, we could be sterilized. If we are not beautiful, we are less valuable. If we do not please our husbands we are failures, no matter how unreasonable those expectations might be. We are treated like another class of people, whose bodies are subject to debate by those who will never walk in our shoes. We are paid less for working harder, and charged more for health insurance. If we are strong, we are bitches. If we are intelligent, they make fun of our ass.
This is just another reason why women should be allowed full ownership of their bodies and medical decisions. This is the same argument as abortion and birth control, it all comes back to women being able to decide their future. It’s also about a bunch of men sitting in a room, safely removed from the consequences, not being able to choose for strangers what is right.
I cannot even imagine being so deprived of my childbearing of my uterus, of being gutted and left an empty shell; this is/was eugenics pure and simple…
Same here, Ginnette, I couldn’t imagine, either. It’s hard to believe that there are people out there who still believe that this is right. It’s disgusting!
Performing surgery on someone without permission is assault. For me the issue isn’t really losing the uterus — I waved bye-bye to mine twenty years ago — it’s the issue of consent. Poor, mostly black women were targeted even though this was after WWII when the horrors of Nazi “medical” experiments were widely known.
It’s fucking disgusting.
How disgusting! I didn’t even realise that this went on in the US (I’m in the UK). The money is paltry compensation for a life-changing assault, but it is hard to know what could constitute adequate recompense.
You can thank people like Margaret Sanger and those pushing eugenics in America for this mess. Keep the undesirables from breeding, and you have a better society.
And now, conservatives, who claim are for getting out of people’s business, just want to get all up in your uterus. What pisses me off this was continuing on right into the 70s. 50K is bullshit for what they did, there is no amount of money that can replace not having the choice of leaving something to continue on
Sanger was a believer in eugenics. She had an uncomfortable relationship to other eugenicists, who were mostly opposed to birth control, especially for the ‘desirable stock,’ i.e. western European. Sanger’s definition of unfit differed from theirs. Sanger’s main motivation was to give women control over the number and spacing of their children.
Lots o’detail on the “Negro Project” here:
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/newsletter/articles/bc_or_race_control.html See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger#Race
While researching _War Against the Weak_, it was difficult for me to face that one of my teenage heroes was a proponent of eugenics. But to blame South Carolina’s sterilization program mainly on her is a big stretch.