Race, Reproduction, and Constitutional Law

• Author: Dorothy Roberts
• Pages: 2096-2098

Page 2096

Race has always influenced the meaning of reproductive freedom in America. Scientific racism explained the domination of whites over blacks as the natural social order: blacks were biologically destined to be slaves and whites to be their masters. For three centuries, courts and legislatures carefully defined race according to amount of black ancestry and enforced the rule of white racial purity. One of America's earliest laws was a 1662 Virginia SLAVERY

Page 2097

statute that gave the children born to slave mothers and fathered by white men the status of slaves. Laws against MISCEGENATION, designed to keep the races from intermingling, were not declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1967. Even today, Americans' continued understanding of race as an inherited trait profoundly connects reproductive policy to racial politics.

Regulating black women's reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppression in America. Slave-masters had a financial incentive to exploit slave women's reproductive capacity to replenish the enslaved labor force. During the Depression, the alliance between the emerging BIRTH CONTROL movement and eugenicists paved the way for public birth control clinics aimed at reducing the birthrates of poor blacks in the South. It was discovered in the 1970s that thousands of black women had been coercively sterilized annually under government welfare programs. Federally funded programs had similarly sterilized more than one-third of women of childbearing age in PUERTO RICO and one-fourth of Native American women.

Although contemporary reproductive health policies are not so blatantly racist, many coercive policies have a disparate effect on minority women and are arguably designed to curb the birthrates of minority mothers on welfare in particular. Many states have enacted child exclusion policies, or "family caps," that deny additional benefits for children born to women already receiving public assistance. Politicians have proposed even more coercive measures, such as mandating that mothers on welfare be implanted with the long-acting contraceptive Norplant. In the 1980s prosecutors across the country initiated a punitive response to the problem of drug use during pregnancy. Although the problem cuts across racial and economic lines, the vast majority of more than two hundred women prosecuted for prenatal crimes were poor black mothers who smoked crack cocaine...