Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Contraceptive vaccines “regulate fertility by manipulating the body’s immune responses” and “stimulating the immune system to shut down some bodily functions necessary for pregnancy” (140). They react within the body the way that vaccines given to infants cause the body to fight smallpox, measles, and other viruses. Judith Richter, a health activist and medical entrepreneur, has promoted the term “immunocontraceptive,” or “immunological contraceptive.” The best-researched contraceptive vaccine “uses antibodies to a hormone called human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG),” which is necessary “for the implantation and development of the embryo” (140). An anti-hCG vaccine’s effect lasts for six months to a year. In addition, researchers worked on oral contraceptive vaccines that would have prevented pregnancy for several years. One such project sought to create “a vaccine from genetically altered salmonella bacteria” (141) and planned to market it in powder form (141). Former presidential candidate Ross Perot invested $2.8 million in Zonagen, Inc., a Texas-based biotechnology company that was developing an antipregnancy vaccine.

However, contraceptive vaccines may have more risks than existing long-term birth control methods. The antibodies in the vaccines may trigger potentially “dangerous immune responses, such as allergies and autoimmune disorders” (141). They can also worsen “existing infectious diseases and immune disturbances” (141), which in those infected with HIV can deteriorate health, leading to AIDS. Those who wish to go off the contraceptive vaccine would have to wait anywhere from several months to years for the contraceptive’s effect to wane. Reproductive health advocates have expressed the additional concern that some might abuse immunological contraceptives, as Norplant and Depo-Provera have been. In 1993, an international lobby, organized by the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, formed in protest to contraceptive vaccines.

Depo-Provera (Medroxyprogesterone acetate) is a long-acting contraceptive administered by injection. Its manufacturer is the Upjohn Company, and by the mid-1990s, it had been “used by 15 million in over ninety countries” (139). In the 1970s, health authorities coerced poor young Black women and girls, particularly in the South, into receiving the then-experimental contraceptive. In one instance, nurses who worked for the “federally funded Montgomery Community Action Agency” (91) visited 14-year-old Minnie Lee Relf and her 12-year-old sister, Mary Alice. The nurses asked the girls’ parents, illiterate farmhands, if they could admit the girls to the hospital to receive injections of the contraceptive. The Relfs learned much later that the injections had sterilized their daughters. In the spring of 1973, Congress “ordered an end to the hormonal injections when they were linked to cancer in laboratory animals” (91).

In later decades, Depo-Provera replaced Norplant as the preferred long-acting contraceptive. Before this, physicians had used the drug as a cancer therapy. As with Norplant, the marketing of Depo-Provera focused on women of color as a desirable method of long-term contraception. Depo-Provera “delivers progestin into the bloodstream” in “an intense concentration” (139). Norplant, on the other hand, gradually releases its hormone into the blood. Depo-Provera lasts from three to six months. Women on the contraceptive have complained about having side effects like those caused by Norplant, including heavy bleeding. Others claim not to have had a period for up to a year. Some studies have connected Depo-Provera to bone loss, osteoporosis, and breast cancer.

Depo-Provera is much cheaper than Norplant. It costs $45 every three months, whereas Norplant costs hundreds in one lump sum. Women in developing countries who have access to the contraceptive prefer it, as the shot is more easily associated with the inoculations that people regularly receive. As with Norplant, health care workers have abused the drug. Like the Relfs, Southern Black and Indigenous women have received Depo-Provera for birth control, as have women in developing countries such as Thailand, Mexico, and India, without proper consent. Black women working at factories and on farms in apartheid-era South Africa have received forcible distributions of the drug. 

A popular Progressive Era movement, eugenics “embraced the theory that intelligence and other personality traits are genetically determined and therefore inherited” (61). This belief that heredity predetermines one’s characteristics, coupled with the reformist zeal of the Progressive Era, fueled the notion that the nation could eliminate its social ills “by stemming biological degeneracy,” or controlling what kinds of people could have children.

Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist, explorer, and anthropologist, is an early forebear of eugenics because of his studies of human intelligence. Galton became interested in heredity and selective mating after reading Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, published in 1859. In 1883, Galton invented the word “eugenics,” which comes from a Greek word meaning “good in birth,” for the publication of his book on the subject, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. Galton supported “positive eugenics”—that is, improving a population by increasing reproduction among those who belonged to a (supposedly) select class.

The study of eugenics in the US began in the early 1900s. More than 120 articles on eugenics appeared between 1910 and 1915, and American colleges offered courses on the topic. The American Eugenics Society (AES), formed in 1922 by the reformist and economist Irving Fisher, reached broader audiences by holding Better Babies and Fitter Families contests at state fairs nationwide.

Eugenicists held that intelligence was “the primary indicator of human value,” which led to their emphasis on the IQ test to “quantify intellectual ability […] despite the objections of its creator, Alfred Binet” (64). Mental tests began to overtake cranial measurements as a means of determining intellectual capacity and notions of inferiority and superiority. Many psychologists used mental tests to prove their prejudice that Black people and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were inferior to Americans of Anglo-Saxon or Northern European descent.

While positive eugenics encouraged reproduction among a select class, “negative eugenics,” which has had a more lasting social impact, was the policy of eliminating those deemed inadequate through sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt supported eugenic sterilization. In 1914, Harry Hamilton Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, “proposed a schedule for sterilizing 15 million people over the next two generations, as well as a model sterilization law to accomplish this plan” (68). Laughlin received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1936—an acknowledgement of what Laughlin termed “a common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics” (68). During the Third Reich, the Nazis modeled their compulsory sterilization policy on one that authorities instituted in California.

By the 1930s, the eugenicist movement had turned its interests from immigrants to Black people. Eugenicists worried that interracial offspring “would deteriorate the white race” (71), which led to their forming alliances with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

By the 1940s, consideration of eugenics as a legitimate science ceased and its association with racism gained credence. The Carnegie Institute stopped funding eugenics research at Cold Spring Harbor in 1939. After the Holocaust, many American eugenicists recoiled at how their ideas had fostered the Nazi’s “final solution”: the murder of six million European Jews, Roma people, gay people, and other groups deemed undesirable. The American Eugenics Society changed its name in 1972 to the Society for the Study of Social Biology, which currently publishes the journal Biodemography and Social Biology. 

Congress passed this law to prohibit “programs receiving federal funds from coercing women to undergo an abortion or sterilization procedure” by claiming that uncooperative women would lose their welfare benefits (130). Despite the law’s passage, Roberts points out, sterilization programs targeted low-income Black women in the 1970s. In the 1990s, heavy marketing of long-acting birth control methods, particularly the subcutaneously implanted Norplant contraceptive, targeted low-income Black women and teens. Roberts illustrates that while the federal government acted to discourage coerced abortions and sterilizations, health care professionals frequently ignored and circumvented the law. Moreover, they received federal funding to encourage low-income women of color to get Norplant.

This policy—officially known as the Interagency Policy on Cocaine Abuse in Pregnancy—was instituted by Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in “a series of internal memos that provided for nonconsensual drug testing of pregnant patients,” as well as reports to the police and arrest “for drug and child abuse charges” (157). The policy began two months after a MUSC nurse, Shirley Brown, went to local solicitor Charles Condon in August 1989 and voiced alarm about the number of pregnant patients she encountered who were crack users. Under the policy, women who tested positive for crack cocaine when they gave birth were immediately arrested, sometimes merely hours after giving birth. They were typically escorted from the hospital in handcuffs and shackles. Condon, who may have supported the program to aid his career ambitions, added an amnesty program to the policy: Patients would be offered treatment, but if they refused for any reason, they’d be arrested. Ironically, at the time that the policy began, the state didn’t have “a single residential treatment center for pregnant addicts” (178). Requests for outpatient services were denied. Those who tested positive for drugs a second time received no second chance and were immediately “arrested and imprisoned” (158). The charge against the mother depended on the stage of her pregnancy. She might have faced charges of “drug possession, child neglect, or distribution of drugs to a minor” (158). In its first year, the policy resulted in the arrests of 42 maternity patients, all Black women.

In explaining negative stereotypes about Black women, the first that Roberts cites is that of Jezebel—a prototype that has existed since the antebellum era. The name comes from the eponymous Biblical figure whose vengeful, despotic behavior fostered crippling internecine strife in Israel for decades. Like this namesake, a Jezebel is a deceptive woman of boundless energy. The image, when projected onto Black women, implied unmitigated sexual desire. The Jezebel was the foil for the (supposedly) virtuous white Southern woman, whose chastity and devotion to her family were foreign to the Black enslaved woman. The Jezebel stereotype portrayed a woman who was sexually wanton with both Black and white men and indifferent to her children. The image, which evolved from the need to blame enslaved Black women for the frequency of sexual assault on plantations, has perpetuated in modern culture. In the 1990s, when Roberts authored her book, the image was most prevalent in music video culture. Rap videos frequently featured the “video vixen,” usually a Black woman, who served as a sexual prop to the male musical artist.

The second negative stereotype that Roberts explores is Mammy. This stereotype—which usually portrays Mammy as middle-aged, corpulent, always smiling, and wearing a headkerchief—evolved from the long-serving house slave on antebellum plantations. A figure of selfless maternal care, Mammy devoted her attention to the white family that she served, particularly the children that she raised and suckled, and asked for nothing in return. She existed within a system that valued her only for her unyielding service (which the system would have forced out of her had she not complied). The most visible version of Mammy is Aunt Jemima—a ubiquitous image used to sell the pancake breakfast products of the same name. The image’s usage in food-product advertising underscores the cultural connections between food service, hospitality, and the history of slavery. The figure often appeared in Hollywood cinema, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s, most notably with Hattie McDaniel’s character, appropriately named Mammy, in Gone With the Wind (1939). Additionally, the fact that Mammy’s actual given name was often virtually unknown points to her existence solely as a maternal figure.

This “grassroots movement composed of welfare mothers,” attorneys, and “welfare rights centers” advocated for reform “in the welfare system’s eligibility and procedural rules” (195). The movement “secured entitlement to benefits, raised benefit levels, and increased availability of benefits to families headed by women” (195). The expansion of welfare partly resulted from President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, which sought to root out racial bias in New Deal programs, including that which funded welfare. By 1967, one welfare caseload that had been “86 percent white had become 46 percent nonwhite” (195). In the same year, Black members of the NWRO protested for Black mothers to receive the same benefits as white mothers. In response, Senate Finance Committee chair Russell Long called the women “Black Brood Mares, Inc.,” and said that if the protestors could find time to picket and sit in committee hearing rooms all day, they could find the time to work. After a series of urban riots in the summer of 1967, Congress “enacted a series of welfare limits,” which the NWRO characterized as “vindictive” (196).

Norplant is a long-acting subcutaneous contraceptive that “consists of six silicone capsules, each about the size of a matchstick, filled with a synthetic hormone called levonorgestrel” (103). Levonorgestrel is the same kind of hormone as in some oral contraceptives. A doctor makes a small incision just under the skin of a woman’s upper arm and implants the capsules “in a fan-shaped design” (103). Norplant works by preventing ovulation but also by obstructing sperm from reaching an egg by thickening the cervical mucus. The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of Norplant on December 10, 1990. Many praised it as “the first major birth control breakthrough since the pill” (103). Norplant protects a woman from pregnancy for up to five years. Its failure rate is only 1%.

The Population Council first developed Norplant “as a tool of population control in Third World countries” (134). Indonesia was one of the first countries that received a distribution of the Norplant contraceptive. Norplant research and distribution received about $15 million in US foreign aid. Norplant was deemed best for poor, semi-literate women in developing countries because it didn’t require daily intake. In later years, Norplant’s American distributor, Wyeth-Ayerst, spent $2.8 billion per year to provide Norplant to low-income women through its nonprofit organization, the Norplant Foundation.

Unfortunately, Norplant replaced sterilization as a form of reproductive abuse against low-income women of color. Similarly, the system pressured them to get it. Numerous state legislatures offered women on welfare financial bonuses if they got the implant, while other states required “implantation as a condition of receiving benefits” (106). When authorities arrested a woman, usually Black or Latina, for a drug offense, they offered Norplant as a condition of probation.

Black women who requested removal of Norplant capsules from their arms were often denied, despite the contraceptive’s causing harmful side effects such as rapid weight gain. Other side effects mirror those of some birth control pills: nausea, dizziness, changes in appetite, depression, anxiety, hair loss, acne, breast tenderness, and ovarian cysts. The contraceptive’s continual release of progestin disrupts menstrual cycles. Some women have complained of pain at the insertion site, while others have noted reactions “similar to those alleged in the silicone breast implant litigation” (119). Norplant implants that aren’t removed after five years may lead to ectopic pregnancy. Because of difficulties with Norplant, some women have attempted to remove the implants themselves, while others sought care from physicians who were not adept at removing the capsules. Women who have high blood pressure, diabetes, sickle-cell anemia, heart disease, and kidney disease—conditions that usually affect Black women—should not use Norplant.

House Republicans proposed this act as part of their Contract with America (1994), a series of legislation that involved tax cuts, crime reduction measures, and a balanced budget. Republicans “cited statistics of Black behavior to explain the need for [the act’s] measures” (203). In the proposal, Republicans asserted welfare dependency usually resulted from out-of-wedlock childbirth. The proposal sought “to penalize unwed mothers and their children” (210). It prohibited AFDC benefits to mothers under 18—unless the mother married the father of her children or found them an adoptive family.