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

Charles Alan Murray is an American political scientist and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank. Murray is best known for his book The Bell Curve (1994), which argued that racial differences explained variations in intelligence. The book gave further credence to lingering falsehoods about Black inferiority, rooted in 18th- and 19th-century racial pseudoscience. Murray’s other books include Losing Ground (1984) and Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012). The latter evolved from his Wall Street Journal editorial “The Coming White Underclass.” Murray’s ideas are rooted in the racist thinking that fostered the eugenics movement. His connection of race to intelligence has no scientific grounding, as race is a social construct. Murray’s ideas also connect to the 19th century’s racial pseudoscience, including craniometry, or the measuring of skulls to determine the intellectual inferiority or superiority of racial groups. 

Margaret Sanger, regarded as “the mother of the birth control movement,” founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL), which she formed in 1921. Sanger coined the term “birth control” and devoted her life to upholding a woman’s right to use contraceptives despite the prevailing law of her time, social convention, and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church. The ABCL joined with other groups to form the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA) in 1939. Sanger served as honorary chair of the board. The BCFA later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the leading reproductive rights organization in the US. Before advocating for reproductive rights, Sanger was a public health nurse in New York and developed an interest in reproductive rights after seeing poor women exhausted by “unwanted pregnancies and endangered by self-induced abortions” (59). Sanger held that women could have some control over their own reproductive destinies with contraceptives that they could take and control, instead of relying on men’s use of condoms or withdrawal.

Authorities arrested Sanger twice for violating both state and federal laws against contraception. Her first arrest was in 1914, when the US Attorney’s office charged her with violating the Comstock Law after distributing her magazine, The Woman Rebel. If sentenced, Sanger would have gone to prison for up to 45 years. To avoid this, she fled to Europe. She returned one year later, and the government dropped the charges in 1916. In that year, Sanger opened her first clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. There, she distributed diaphragms “to hundreds of women” (59). The police raided the clinic 10 days after it opened and arrested Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, who worked as a nurse there. The court convicted Sanger of violating a law that banned the distribution of contraceptives and sentenced her to 30 days in a workhouse.

After the First World War, Sanger’s ideas were associated less with early feminism and increasingly with eugenics. Her belief that women deserved sexual gratification cost her support from the suffragist movement, “which emphasized maternal virtue and chastity” (72). By reframing her campaign within eugenics, Sanger thought she could show that birth control was in the nation’s interests, which was to avoid further degeneration of the population by allowing those deemed unfit to procreate.

In recent years, Sanger’s legacy as a women’s advocate has become controversial because of her association with eugenics. Sanger espoused eugenics beliefs most vocally in her book The Pivot of Civilization (1922), in which she promoted birth control as key to dealing with overpopulation. She colluded with eugenicists to “record race and national origin on patient-history cards” at her clinics (75). Worse, the ABCL counted “avowed racists such as Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color” (75), a white supremacist text published in 1920, and C.C. Little, president of the Third Race Betterment Conference, among her influences. Sanger differed from them in that she didn’t appear to believe that problems among certain racial groups were the results of inherent factors. Instead, she attributed their ills to a confluence of social factors, many of them economic. Still, Sanger exhibited paternalism toward Black people. Though she had far more confidence than many white people in Black women’s ability to use birth control, she expressed no intention of allowing Black people to oversee the birth control programs in their own communities. 

Shirley Brown was a nurse at Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston. In August 1989, Brown went to the city’s solicitor, Charles Condon, and informed him “about the increase in crack use she perceived among her pregnant patients” (157). With Condon’s legal support, Brown became “the chief enforcer of the Charleston Interagency Policy” (166). Although genuine concern for the women and their newborns may have inspired her efforts, her Black patients reported mistreatment from her. Additionally, Brown “expressed negative views about her Black patients to drug counselors and social workers,” including the belief that Black women should undergo tubal ligation and “that birth control should be put in the water in Black communities” (166). Brown’s views are inextricable from those who have encouraged sterilization within Black communities. Brown targeted Black women. In the sole instance of a white woman’s arrest under her program, Brown curiously noted on the patient’s chart “that her boyfriend was Black” (158). 

James Marion Sims was a 19th century physician and pioneer in gynecological surgery. His reputation as a scientist, however, is controversial because he performed “countless operations, without anesthesia, on female slaves purchased expressly for his experiments” (166-67). In 2018, New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, authorized removal of a bronze statue of Sims from Central Park.

Sims’s legacy is inextricable from trends in medical science to experiment on Black subjects (e.g., the Tuskegee Experiment, in which the US Public Health Service and the Center for Disease Control used 400 Black men to observe the effects of untreated syphilis) and to disregard Black women’s interests and well-being in the pursuits of health care and medical science. Doctors who have forced Black women to have caesarean sections and blood transfusions against their will operate with a similar disregard for Black women’s bodily autonomy that Sims expressed when operating on enslaved Black women.