BioMed
Black scholar Dorothy Roberts traces slavery, coerced sterilization, and pregnancy prosecutions to show why reproductive liberty includes raising children with dignity.
Eugenic thinking holds that social problems come from the disadvantaged having children, so their childbearing should be discouraged. In a society ranked by race, that principle reliably becomes policy aimed at reducing Black women's fertility. Judgments about who is 'fit' to reproduce absorb whatever prejudices are current.
Reproductive freedom means more than the right to avoid or end a pregnancy. It also means freedom from pressure not to have children, and the material support needed to bear and raise them with dignity. A definition built only around avoiding pregnancy leaves out the women whose childbearing is being discouraged.
The same technology can expand choices for some women while being pushed on others to limit their births. As birth control became more available to white women, poor Black women were being coerced into sterilization. For decades, sterilization was the only publicly funded birth control offered to poor women of color.
When someone gains economically from a woman's capacity to bear children, they gain a reason to control her sexuality and motherhood. Enslaved women's fertility increased owners' wealth, and taking away their control over sex and motherhood stripped away part of their standing as people. The same logic warns against arrangements that turn women's reproductive capacity into a commodity.
Once a pregnant woman and the fetus she carries are treated as opponents with separate interests, the law and medicine can act against her in the name of the fetus. Under slavery, pregnant women were whipped in a way meant to spare the fetus, which served the owner's interest in both her labor and her offspring. The same framing later justified prosecuting pregnant women.
Prosecuting drug-using pregnant women in effect punished them for having babies. A woman could avoid the charge by ending the pregnancy, so the real offense was becoming pregnant while addicted, not the drug use itself. The policy regulated who may bear children while presenting itself as fetal protection.
Where authorities choose to look shapes who gets punished, whatever the actual behavior. Black women were about ten times as likely as white women to be reported for drug use in pregnancy, even though white women used drugs slightly more. Rules that look neutral produce racial results through selective reporting.
Practices built to control one group's reproduction leave behind laws and ways of thinking that keep permitting coercion after the original system ends. The degradation of Black motherhood that began under slavery carried into twentieth-century sterilization programs and later policy. This is why that history shows what is at stake whenever the state denies reproductive liberty.
Welfare rules that refuse added benefits for more children are presented as discouraging births. In practice they mostly leave families with less money for each child. Women's childbearing choices are manipulated through bribes and threats, and the costs fall on children.
Formal individual rights mean little to women who lack the social and material conditions to use them, so reproductive justice cannot be separated from fighting racial oppression. That requires a view of liberty and equality in which government actively builds social justice, not just one that guarantees noninterference. Movements that ignore the reproductive needs of their most marginalized members repeat the exclusion.