Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963–1978

6. Population Scares and Antiviolence Roots of Reproductive Justice

In 1964 the Mississippi House of Representatives passed a bill to reduce illegitimate child birth by punishing parents with prison time orsterilization.TheStudentNonviolentCoordinatingCommittee(SNCC) quickly published Genocide in Mississippi, in which they analyzed the bill’s intent to “drive Negroes from Mississippi, and to render those who refused to leave incapable of having children.”1 Stalwart civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer delivered a speech to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a group in which she was also a member. She recounted how she had been sterilized without her consent in 1961. She explained that she was not alone, but among the six in ten Black women in Sunflower County, Mississippi, who had been sterilized after giving birth. Hamer then described the bombings, beatings, and shootings that civil rights activists endured trying to register people to vote.2 In 1963 WSP activist Ruth Shapin spoke out against war as another coercive force that would prevent her and other women from having and raisingchildren :“Today’sarmsraceisespeciallythreateningtowomenbecause • CHAPTER 6 • Population Scares and Antiviolence Roots of Reproductive Justice Next to the pursuit of peace, the really great challenge of the human family is the race between food supply and population increase. . . . The time for concerted action is here, and we must get on with the job. —President Lyndon Johnson, State of the Union Address People still believe that old lie that A.F.D.C. mothers keep on having kids just to get a bigger welfare check. . . . Having babies for profit is a lie that only men could make up, and only men could believe. Men, who never have to bear the babies or have to raise them and maybe send them to war. —Johnnie Tillmon, Ms. • 153 • now the very testing of weapons contaminates our food supply . . . , threatening the health of our children, damaging the germ plasm of future generations , and even raising the spectre of sterility. (If we keep testing, the birth control problem may solve itself!)”3 Shapin, who presumably was white and middle class, was likely not subject to the same kind of coercive control over her reproduction that Black, Latina, Native, and poor white women faced. The meanings that “birth control” had for these women in their individual lives were profoundly different, yet situating their experiences in relation to the broader forces of racism and war that shaped their lives illuminates the Cold War terrain on which reproductive justice would be articulated.4 Reproductive justice became an important, if overlooked, principle of concern uniting the peace, civil rights, and welfare rights movements. This chapter resumes discussion of the alliance between women’s peace and welfare rights activism discussed in chapter 4 in terms of the Mothering Underground. For these groups, reproduction was a multiply scaled issue, linking individual women’s bodies to their current and hoped-for families, and to collective futures that were threatened by racist legislators and warmakers alike. This chapter situates the feminist women’s health movement and struggles over forced sterilization and abortion within the context of the Cold War. It challenges dominant understandings of reproductive rights that focus almost exclusively on the body and sexual reproduction. Instead, reproductive justice is seen to encompass the possibilities for life and selfdetermination , in short, social reproduction. While feminists tend to be wary of being determined solely through our biological capacities and are critical of maternalist essentialisms, received histories of the women’s health and reproductive justice movements unwittingly tie liberatory visions to the scale of the individual body. The dominant narrative of the 1970s women’s health movement begins with a technology (i.e., the pill) that enabled women’s sexual liberation, and is consummated by Roe v. Wade. This narrative of progress was contested at the time, and feminist scholars continue to challenge it, but we are still invited to remember, commemorate, and defend Roe and “choice” as the mark of women’s freedom, while forgetting the struggles against war racism and welfare repression that women were simultaneously waging. To reframe the individual bodily scale at which reproduction is often understood,thischaptersituatesthepostwarhistoryofreproductivejustice 154 POPULATION SCARES AND REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE within Cold War debates over population, poverty, peace, and revolution. Thomas Malthus—an eighteenth-century cleric and one of the “fathers” of the discipline of economics—posited that population increases would naturally outstrip food supplies. This equation was later discredited. Still, thepoliticalimplicationthattoomanypoorpeoplearethecauseofpoverty has been used to naturalize class hierarchy and...