Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement: and the Reproductive Rights Movement

2. “An act of valor for a woman need not take place inside of her”: Black Women, Feminism, and Reproductive Rights

“An act of valor for a woman need not take place inside of her” Black Women, Feminism, and Reproductive Rights Some Black Nationalists charge that the white power structure not only favors abortion law repeal, but is actually pushing it as a means of eliminating the black population, as well as all poor people . Of all the lies and moralism men have used to obligate women to bear more of their children, this one takes the cake. Not content with identifying a woman’s freedom to terminate pregnancy with murder, as President Nixon does, these black reactionaries hold the accusation of genocide over every black woman who wants an abortion and over feminists of every race who fight for this right. A black woman who has an abortion is not merely committing murder , they charge. She is participating in the murder of her whole people. —Kathie Sarachild of Redstockings Black women are often afraid to permit any kind of necessary surgery because they know from bitter experience that they are more likely than not to come out of the hospital without their insides . —Frances Beal of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Part of this struggle to control our own bodies is the fight against forced sterilization and population-control schemes. . . . [W]e will also fight the racist laws which have been proposed in some states, which stipulate that welfare mothers must be sterilized after they have had a certain number of children. —Third World Women’s Workshop 2 55 Reproductive freedom means the freedom to have as well as not to have children. Policies that restrict women’s right to have and raise children—through forced sterilization or the denial of adequate welfare benefits—are directly related to policies that compel women to have children, on the view that this is their primary human function . —The Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) Black men active in the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s made strong and sometimes inflammatory statements about the use of contraception and abortion by black women. An initial investigation of the discourse surrounding black women’s attempts to control their reproductive bodies suggests that black men dominated the emerging dialogue and made it a subset of the Black Nationalist impulse . Even white feminists, such as Kathie Sarachild of the radical feminist organization Redstockings, recognized that the pronatalist rhetoric of Black Nationalists was at the forefront of public conversation about black women and fertility control. In all this discussion of black women’s fertility, black women’s voices on how best to control their own reproduction often got lost.1 Black women seldom receive proper credit for the work they have done on reproductive rights. Nor have white feminists often acknowledged the extent to which black women shaped the feminist reproductive rights movement.2 What black women were saying about their reproductive bodies helps us to understand their views of reproductive control. In listening to black women, one discovers that they offered a more complicated view of reproductive control than did either Black Nationalists or white women’s liberationists. Politically active black women of the early 1970s carved out a reproductive rights discourse that involved relative autonomy over reproductive decisions not only in relation to black men but in relation to white feminists and white society as well. They rejected the Black Nationalist argument that the birth of children to black women reinforced black masculinity . They also disagreed with the claim that the use of birth control and abortion by black women spelled genocide for the race.3 Moreover, they criticized abortion rights feminists for their narrow focus on legal abortion, insisting that feminists needed to bring reproductive abuses ex56 | Chapter Two perienced by women of color—such as involuntary sterilization—to the forefront of their political agenda. Black women—some of whom identi- fied themselves with the women’s liberation movement—argued further that white feminists needed to forge an inclusive reproductive rights agenda that synthesized anti-poverty politics, welfare rights, and access to reproductive and basic health care if they wanted to include women of color in their movement. They proclaimed that improved access to total health care, a living wage, adequate housing, and subsidized child-care all needed to be present before a woman could know she had total control over her fertility. Although history has not acknowledged it, black women met with...