Feminist Eugenics: Coerced Sterilization and Mandated Maternity

Towards the end of The Bell Jar, as Esther Greenwood sits in yet another doctor's office, babies proliferate. In "page after page" of the issue of baby talk she flips through while she waits, their "fat, bright faces" glow up at her: "bald babies, chocolate-colored babies, Eisenhower-faced babies, babies rolling over for the first time, babies reaching for rattles, babies eating their first spoonful of solid food, babies doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up."1 Looking up from "The Magazine of Information Every New Mother Needs," Esther is assaulted by impossible expectations.2 "How easy having babies seemed to the women around me!" she exclaims, "Why couldn't I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway?"3 Dodo Conway, a suburban Catholic mother of seven, is an exaggerated advertisement for the fate of an educated wife and mother. She has a degree from Barnard, is married to an architect from Columbia, yet she spends her days happily making "peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches" for her brood.4 Reflecting on these seductive images of normative maternity, Esther asks, "Why was I so unmaternal and apart?" Her speculations close with a dour one-liner: "If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad."5

The broader conditions of Esther's anxiety were diagnosed by Betty Friedan in 1963 as "the problem that has no name." The repression experienced by white middle-class American women during the Cold War led a generation of feminists to adopt Sylvia Plath's novel alongside Friedan's book of the same year as key texts in the women's movement. According to Friedan, the 1950s produced a powerful discourse "telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers."6 The "independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for" were lost on the generation that came of age in easy days of post-war abundance, Freidan claims.7 The creature comforts of mid-century domesticity, both works suggest, come at a profound cost to women's creative lives and broader horizons. In The Bell Jar, Buddy Willard tells Esther in "a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more." Both Plath and Freidan invoke the recent war in their descriptions of the cultural norms of reproduction. In her widening depression, Esther thinks that "maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state."8 Friedan likewise evokes the specter of totalitarianism in her ill-chosen chapter title: "Progressive Dehumanization: The Comfortable Concentration Camp." The references to National Socialism are symptomatic of the eugenic pressures at work beneath the surface of postwar domestic bliss. The reproductive demand for certain women to "devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children" is that of positive eugenics.9

Eugenics is an applied science of human breeding. Negative eugenics seeks to cull the herd, aligning with popular Malthusian prophecies, like Paul Erlich's The Population Bomb (1968), and racist anxieties about immigrant fertility, like Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia (2004).10 But positive eugenics--from the Race Betterment Foundation funded by John Harvey Kellogg, of breakfast cereal fame, to assistive reproductive technologies in our present--seeks to breed better stock. While negative eugenics pursued legislative means of "preventing reproduction by defectives and subnormals," positive eugenics engaged in public education campaigns to remedy "the shortage of births [which] has extended to almost all educated, urbanized people."11 The Better Babies and Fitter Families contests of the interwar years helped produce the discourse of mandated maternity that Friedan and Plath encounter. If the American Eugenics Society saw "a disproportionately low birth rate in socially adequate homes, and a disproportionately high birth rate in inadequate homes" in 1935, the conditions of American prosperity after 1945 produced a proliferation of "socially adequate homes" and socially adequate housewives along with them.12 Birth control and abortion access became key issues of the women's movement in response to the differential reproductive demands of eugenic thought.

Eugenics was an extraordinarily popular and widely respected discourse embraced by American intellectuals across the political spectrum. Scholars including Alexandra Minna Stern, Daylanne English, Thomas Leonard, and Elena Gutiérrez have documented the power and persistence of eugenics in US law, literature, economics, and politics.13 The term was coined by Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. The 1883 neologism combines the Greek roots εὐ (eu) for good or well, and γεν (gen) for to be born and to beget, to name the science of breeding better humans. Yet the practices of social engineering it names are much older: they appear in Plato's Republic and, as Mackenzie Cooley has recently demonstrated, in Renaissance Europe.14 In the modern era, the practices of scientifically breeding a better society gained widespread appeal, and England and the United States became centers of an international eugenics movement. The Eugenic Sterilization Act that passed in Germany in 1933 under National Socialist rule was based on American models.

Throughout this history, abortion and sterilization have been employed as mechanisms of reproductive control. The tension between coercion and choice is apparent in the first version of Our Bodies, Ourselves, published in 1970 as Women and Their Bodies. The Boston Women's Health Collective acknowledged the fear that "poor and black peoples" may be "forcibly made to abort or be sterilized" in order "to keep the most oppressed populations in check" even as it enthusiastically cites the Japanese Eugenic Protection Law of 1948, which "instituted abortion as the national method of population control."15 The threat of reproductive control appears in another anecdote from the same text in which a pregnant American who sought a "therapeutic abortion" in the late sixties was expected to voluntarily request a tubal ligation to accompany the procedure.16 Lana Clarke Phelan and Patricia Therese Maginnis describe this as a common practice in their 1969 Abortion Handbook for Responsible Women, noting sarcastically that "an 'insane' woman must not be permitted to bear more children, and if she is insane enough not to desire children as the state and church desire she desire them, than that's all for her."17

In California, where more coerced sterilizations were performed than any other state in the union, a 1909 law called for "asexualization" when the medical or custodial authorities of a state run mental hospital or prison judged such a procedure to be "conductive to the benefit of the physical, mental, or moral condition of any inmate" or if a convict had shown themselves to be "a moral and sexual pervert."18 A 1919 amendment specified that the law applied to individuals "afflicted with mental disease which may have been inherited and is likely to be transmitted to descendants."19 The law was amended multiple times over the course of the twentieth century, but it was not repealed until 1979.20

The case that led to the repeal of the California statute was argued from the grounds of Roe v. Wade. In 1975 a civil rights class action lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, was filed by 10 Mexican-American women against the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. All of the plaintiffs had been surgically sterilized during childbirth. They were pressured to consent to the procedure in the depths of labor, through a haze of pain and misinformation. Consuelo Hermosillo, one of the plaintiffs, recalled a woman's voice saying, "Mijita, you better sign those papers or your baby could probably die here."21 Dr. Karen Benker, a medical student at the time, witnessed aggressive coercion: she recounts that "the doctor would hold a syringe in front of the mother who was in labor pain and ask her if she wanted a pain killer; while the woman was in the throes of a contraction the doctor would say, 'Do you want the pain killer? Then sign the papers."22 Several of the women thought they were signing consent forms for an emergency Cesarean section, and many believed the process was reversible. The tubal-ligation of multiparous Mexican-American women by Los Angeles physicians was an attempt to limit the reproduction of people our society has deemed "unfit parents" whom a prior generation would have called "dysgenic." The women lost their case, but the community activism and publicity they generated produced important statewide changes, including new Department of Health guidelines on sterilization that require informed consent materials in the primary language of the patient, and the repeal of the involuntary sterilization statute.23

If the conservative political goal behind Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization is a return to the former reproductive regime, we should be on the lookout for increases in funding for sterilization targeted to low-income communities. In the seventies and eighties, feminists of color, from Angela Davis to the Chicana activists who brought the Madrigal v. Quilligan lawsuit, were constantly reminding white feminists that sterilization abuse was a feminist issue as equally urgent as abortion access. The Combahee River Collective Statement lists "sterilization abuse and abortion rights work" in the same clause, naming the political activities pursued by members of the group.24 Women's "right to plan their pregnancies," as articulated by Davis in Women, Race, and Class, means "legal and easily accessible birth control measures and abortions would have to be complemented by an end to sterilization abuse."25 Both concerns fall under the banner of reproductive justice today, which the SisterSong Collective defines as "the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities."26 To live up to the ethic and politic of reproductive justice and counter the harms of reproductive control, feminists must continue to grapple with historical and contemporary sterilization abuse even as we fight for abortion rights.

Activist texts from years before Roe v. Wade recognize the influence of eugenic thinking. The Abortion Handbook for Responsible Women describes "solemn-faced clerics and male physicians and attorneys" who pronounce on abortion legislation, yet are "quite incompetent to speak for the women they so glibly discuss as though they were herds of cattle."27 Sarcastic cow and calf metaphors appear through the text. An abortion seeker is a "state-cow balking at providing a state calf!"28 A pregnant person is "forced to bring her mass of beginning fetal cells to maturity" not "because our society lacks excellent medical remedy for her problem, but rather because of old laws regarding her body as an animal belonging to the herd of the state."29 The theories and practices of eugenics derived from animal husbandry, transforming women into livestock and the population into "the herd of the state." Women and their Bodies draws on a parallel economic logic of reproductive machines, subject to the historic desire of church and state to "keep its mothers running."30 In claiming the right to abortion, radical feminists identified the pressures of positive eugenics to breed for the benefit of the nation.

Negative eugenics appears in these texts as well. The Boston Women's Health Collective references "world population growth" as a serious concern.31 Phelan and Maginnis cite The Population Bomb in their bibliography and repeatedly evoke its racist fears of "runaway reproduction."32 The opening set piece from Erlich's text is a teeming street scene in India. As the writer stares out the window of his taxi, he sees "People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people."33 Like the babies that proliferate in The Bell Jar, the streets of Delhi overwhelm the narrator and produce a combined emotional and political response. If Esther worries she is "unmaternal and apart" yet chooses sexual liberation, Erlich feels "frankly, frightened" and compelled to write a Malthusian argument for population control.34 Phelan and Maginnis take up his banner in the name of abortion: "Further waste of time intellectualizing on the morality of whether it should or should not be is a luxury our world can not afford at this time of rapid overpopulation and impending world famine."35 Drawing on this discourse of population control in the name of the environment, radical feminists appealed to the imperial utopian impulse of negative eugenics when seeking allies for birth control and abortion activism.

Efforts to abolish eugenic thinking have often concentrated on the negative side of the equation, from Black and Chicana activism in the 1970s to contemporary debates about prenatal testing and the abortion of fetuses with congenital disabilities. The white feminists whose mothers made the baby boom fought the pressures of positive eugenics, but failed to see the broader structure of reproductive control beneath their work. Bearing in mind abortion's eugenic past, what would it mean to cultivate a dysgenic practice, which seeks to disrupt the ongoing power of eugenic thought in human reproduction? The stories of abortion's future depend upon our answer.

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Kim Adams is a postdoctoral fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Humanities Institute and the co-host of High Theory podcast. She writes about American literature and medicine, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era.

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