One of the central demands of women's
struggle against oppression has always been reproductive rights: access to safe
birth control, abortion, and no forced sterilization. None of the demands
against discrimination, including pay equity, have been realized but the
greatest and often violent opposition has been to abortion rights. Many
religious people object to the morality of abortion but their voices are not
more compelling than those of millions of women around the world who seek to
end an unwanted pregnancy by legal or illegal means.
Religious objections should not hold sway
in modern countries with separation of church and state though religion is not
the reason most countries control or outright deny women's access to abortion.
Control of women's biology and the reduction of women to baby machines is the
primary method of politically and economically controlling them. For
governments, it is a matter of social engineering and never was an issue of
morality.
The demand to end forced sterilization is a
necessary part of abortion rights. Forced sterilization is a practice rooted in
eugenics and the theory of overpopulation from the late 19th century. Going as
far back as Thomas Malthus, overpopulation alarmism has always been rooted in
European colonialism and racist hatred. The historic connections between
racism, colonialism and eugenics are direct and in the early days, there were
never even attempts to mask that association.
Forced sterilization was widely and legally
practiced throughout the US in the 19th and most of the 20th century--directed
at "undesirables," those with disabillities, Blacks, Latinas, Native
Americans. Much of the practice was forced sterilization, without the knowledge
or consent of thousands of Black, Latina, & Indigenous women who would go
into clinics for routine procedures and come out sterilized. These practices
continue in the US and other countries. Today, Native American women have considerable
on-going litigation over forced sterilizations; Israel acknowledges performing
it on Ethiopian immigrants; 148 women prison inmates in California were
sterilized without consent (between 2006-2010); it's been rampant in China to
enforce the one-child policy. For US population control programs in African
countries and India most notably, eugenics and forced sterilization is the
guiding principle because at the heart of eugenics is the most monstrous,
stinking racism and white supremacy.
That is precisely why the women's movement
of the 1970s included "Abortion on demand; No forced sterilization"
as a demand--precisely to draw a hard line between those who wanted birth
control and abortion for racist purpose to deny reproductive choice and feminists
who believed in women's right to control their own bodies. Abortion is a
practice that allows women that control; sterilization completely denies it
which is why it is the preferred method of eugenicists.
The most frenetic periods of overpopulation
and eugenics alarmism were at the turn of the 20th century in an era of great
anti-colonial uprisings and massive migrations leading up to WWI. It was
unashamedly promoted all over the world and directed in the US and elsewhere at
immigrants, the working class, disabled, gay, Jewish, Black, Latino, or
Indigenous peoples. It was always associated with the power elite and shilled
as gospel in most elite universities.
Its decline in respectability began with
WWII and the Nazi exterminations (which were eugenics applied to a European
population rather than in the colonies) and in the post-colonial period after
WWII. It is in the post-WWII period when eugenics theory was discredited that
overpopulation began to be highlighted more and in a few decades became a
frenzy. It is not coincidental that after the US Civil Rights Movement in the
1960s and the women's movement of the 1960s-70s eugenical theories
reached a fever pitch because the entire thrust of those movements undermined
white and male supremacy which are fundamental to capitalist social control. It
can no longer operate without them.
In the post-WWII period, the driving force
of population alarmism was massive nationalist and anti-colonial movements
leading to decolonialization. Much of the frenzy was led by British and French
colonial officials who feared a political backlash from the anti-colonial
movements if they openly pushed population control programs. They certainly
could no longer openly espouse eugenics. NGOs and private agencies like the
Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were always centrally involved in population
control and eugenics but this is when their role as government proxies became
indispensable and have remained so. Several colonial administrators
transitioned to heading NGOs involved in eugenics and population control. One
example is the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) founded in
Bombay in 1952. Colville Deverell who administered several British colonies
became the first Secretary-General of IPPF in 1964. The IPPF continues to be
funded by governments, foundations, and the UN. Although Planned Parenthood in
the US is historically associated with eugenics and has never repudiated it,
feminism has made it difficult for them to openly pursue or acknowledge
now.
The decline of the women's movement began
very rapidly with the legalization of abortion in January 1973. Politics, like
nature, abhors a vacuum. Opposition to abortion became a central social issue
for religious fundamentalists and the right-wing in the US. In the 42 years of
legality, these political forces aligned with the Catholic hierarchy have
conducted a relentless and well-financed onslaught to reverse abortion rights
using hundreds of legislative initiatives, legal actions, often paramilitary
violence and assassinations of abortion providers.
One of their targets was funding for the
"family planning"/population control programs overseas and their
efforts have been extremely successful in limiting abortion rights and access
for millions of women. The few remaining women's rights groups like the
National Organization for Women (NOW) and NARAL Pro-Choice America have an
electoral and lobbying political perspective and in over four decades of
sustained assault have only used their authority three times to call massive
protests in defense of abortion. Those marches in Washington, DC all drew
nearly half a million people. The last one was in 2004.
Of course the right-wing onslaught against
abortion dovetails with the perspectives of the ruling elite which has never
been reconciled to abortion rights because it weakens their control over women.
The ink wasn't dry on the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion in the
US before the US instituted the first of many restrictions against funding
abortion in the eugenics programs overseas. Sterilization, with or without
consent, remains the primary method of "family planning" in the
plundered countries because it disempowers women.
Under the ravages of modern capitalism,
control of population is a way of managing the crises their policies create.
They have no possible solutions to massive poverty, starvation, unemployment,
homelessness, immigration--not if they want to continue plundering. So eugenics
provides a barbaric safety valve by destroying the reproductive potential of
millions of women.
Abortion rights in the US are a political
shell game between the two parties of capitalism, with Democrats feigning
support for women's rights and Republicans playing tough moral guardians. If
there's any confusion on that score, a delegation to a 1994 UN population
control conference in Cairo was led by then Democratic Vice President Al Gore
who said, "The US does not seek to establish a new international right to
abortion, and we do not believe that abortion should be encouraged as a method
of family planning.” How does that differ from Ellen Sauerbrey, US Ambassador
to the UN under George Bush, who said “There is no fundamental right to
abortion"?
How that rancid ideology works out in
population control programs and the role of NGOs and foundations as proxies
(including the Ford, Rockefeller, Buffett, and Gates Foundations along with the
World Bank) has just been exposed in the most gruesome way in India. But of
course it is reproduced in countries around the world--from Kenya to Uganda to
the Philippines to the US. In Bilaspur, a city in the Indian state of
Chhattisgarh, thirteen women given tubectomies in a government-run
sterilization camp died and 69 were hospitalized, twenty of them in critical
condition. One doctor had operated on 83 women in six hours--about four minutes
per woman. In the most predictable ways, the government went into overdrive. It
arrested five doctors, including the surgeon. They found the drugs used were
contaminated with rat poison & arrested the pharmaceutical manufacturer
& his son.
They're going to be scapegoating up a storm
to distract from India's criminal policies of population control. And not for
the first time. Indira Gandhi's notorious sterilization program in the 1970s
sterilized over 8 million men, sometimes with compensation but mostly forced.
India now has one of the highest rates of female sterilization in the world
provided free by the government in sterilization camps to control population,
i.e., eugenics. There are between four to five million women sterilized every
year. Some media reports claim sterilization is popular for family planning
because it's free and "sidesteps cultural resistance to and problems with
distribution of other types of contraception in rural areas." Cultural
resistance? Problems with distribution? You can peddle that baloney to a
kindergartner but it's just a slick way of blaming people for the policies of
their government. Is it difficult to distribute birth control because primary
healthcare is in such a sorry state? India reportedly has one of the world's
worst records on maternal healthcare (and that's saying a mouthful) with high
death rates for both mothers and infants at birth. Media reports don't
distinguish who the women are by caste but just as Gandhi's forced
sterilization program targeted Dalits, it is certain they are most affected
now.
It isn't that sterilization is popular with
young women but that the government does not provide alternative birth control
in order to compel sterilization without putting a gun to the women's heads.
Women who ask about birth control are told surgical sterilization is their only
choice. It offers incentive fees of about US $10-20 which is about a week's pay
in a country where 180 million people live on less than $1.25 a day. The
government offers those payments to the women, to the health workers recruiting
them, to the doctors and sets sterilization quotas for each state.
Sterilization is the cornerstone of India's corrupt family planning system.
Now there's something curious going on here
because at the London Family Planning Conference in 2012 attended by all the
big players in population control/eugenics, over US $4.6 billion was pledged to
family planning programs and India was one of the target countries. In
addition, the Gates Foundation targeted India directly and through Family
Planning 2020 (where private donors invest in family planning) to the tune of
millions of dollars. The Gates Foundation boasts of its collaboration with the
Indian government in family planning. So are they involved in these
sterilization camps? Is that where the incentive money comes from? But then why
are there no family planning programs in India? Why isn't birth control
available? Why is prenatal care inadequate? Where the hell is all that money
going? Because if you look at the conditions in the sterilization camps, you
find instances like in West Bengal where 106 women were dumped in a nearby
field for recovery from surgery. You find women dragged out of recovery and
sent home contrary to sound medical practice; women given inferior,
questionable medicines that kill. Or you find instances of squalid grimy health
facilities where one surgeon works on 83 women in six hours. And you find
thousands of cases every year of failed operations, complications, or death due
to sterilization. So what exactly is the agenda here?
Once again, women must fight the historic
battles against eugenicists in government and those in humanitarian disguise
like the Gates and other foundations to take control of health care, of
reproductive rights and services and wield them in the service of women and
children. In the absence of a feminist response to these programs and in one of
the ugliest of historic sarcasms, it is right-wing forces opposed to women's
reproductive freedoms who do the most investigative exposes of the population
control/eugenics programs. And they do it not to advance women's rights but to
deny them.
Even those with religious objections to
abortion cannot abstain from this struggle against eugenics and forced
sterilization because it is not just the colonization of women's bodies but of
entire regions of the world. Women's rights are human rights and that mantra is
not diminished by the odious Hillary Clinton who repeats it while supporting
eugenics programs in the US and around the world.
[MARY SCULLY]
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