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214 In 1978—the same year the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) implemented federal sterilization guidelines—the American Cyanamid Company established a fetal protection policy at its Willow Island, West Virginia, chemical plant that prohibited fertile women from working in departments (seven of nine) that exposed workers to lead. The company employed thirty women, eight of whom held jobs that involved lead exposure. Plant managers informed these eight white women that unless they consented to sterilization, they would either lose their jobs or be transferred to lower-paying positions with less seniority and no chance for advancement. Company insurance covered sterilization, and American Cyanamid promised to grant sick leave to workers who chose this option. Two of the women refused surgery and were transferred to the janitorial department, one woman already sterilized kept her current position, and the five remaining women “chose” sterilization in order to retain their jobs. American Cyanamid was the principal employer in Willow Island. The women had few employment options outside of the plant, and almost no opportunities to earn as much as they did in the pigments department, where they worked. “They don’t have to hold a hammer to your head—all they have to do is tell you that it’s the only way you can keep your job,” one woman who “chose” sterilization explained.1 In a cruel twist of fate, American Cyanamid closed the pigments department just a few months after establishing the new policy and transferred the newly sterilized women to the lesser-paying jobs they had undergone surgery to avoid. American Cyanamid’s policy was not unique. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, companies like General Motors, Allied Chemicals, St. Joe’s Minerals, Olin, and B. F. Goodrich adopted similar policies that The Endurance of Neo-eugenics Chapter 7 banned all women of childbearing potential (defined by General Motors as fertile women between the ages of fifteen and fifty) from jobs that involved toxic chemicals, with the exception of those women surgically sterilized.2 American reproductive policy has historically rested on a central tenet: women cannot be trusted to govern their bodies “responsibly.” Through bans on birth control, the criminalization of abortion, and the passage of eugenic sterilization laws, policy makers (lawmakers and judges) sought to substitute their politics and social goals for women’s own and to reproduce citizens and a society that reflected the values and power of the dominant group, mainly white middle-class men. The notion that women could not be trusted to govern their reproduction dates back to the beginning of the Republic, when women lacked basic citizenship rights and were seen as incapable of equality solely on the basis of their sex. This distrust of women shifted over time, but never fully ended, even with the legalization of birth control and abortion in the 1960s and 1970s. Roe v. Wade, for example, requires that the decision to terminate a pregnancy must be made by a woman and her doctor rather than a woman alone.3 Contemporary restrictions on abortion like mandatory waiting periods and parental consent laws function to deprive women (and girls) of the fundamental right to make independent decisions about their bodies and their reproduction. Forced sterilization and the age/parity policies operated in the same manner. They replaced women’s self-determination with the will and the politics of physicians, social workers, and hospital administrators. American Cyanamid’s policy substituted women’s self-determination with the company’s own paternalism. The company banned fertile women from working in departments that exposed workers to toxic chemicals in order to protect itself against potential litigation. In doing so, it privileged its bottom line above women’s reproductive rights, which by 1978 had been firmly established by the Supreme Court. Significantly, American Cyanamid did not establish similar policies for men, even though research had determined that toxic chemicals could alter sperm and cause congenital abnormalities and infertility in both sexes. In fact, a year before the American Cyanamid policy took effect, exposure to the pesticide DBCP had rendered ten male workers sterile at Occidental Chemical Co. in Lathrop, California.4 Fetal protection policies merged pro-life rhetoric with neo-eugenic ideas to argue that women working in factories could not be trusted to make “responsible” decisions about their bodies and their families. They also challenged women’s recent movement into high-paying manufacturing jobs previously reserved for men. As such, they functioned as institutional resistance to the...

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