Putting The Control Back In Birth Control: Racism, Class And Reproductive Rights

Racist, patriarchal states and bosses have worked together to exercise control over women's bodies using bribes, coercion, and outright force. Slave-owning plantation masters find their modern-day counterparts in the export processing zones and maquiladoras of today. The USAID bureaucrats and "family cap" welfare administrators selectively offering Norplant and tubal ligation echo those moral regulators and eugenicists who sterilized women in poor houses, asylums and brothels in the past. Their tactics range from social assistance incentives, which are often linked to long-term (often unsafe) birth control, to the daily pressures on factory workers to take the Pill, and even so far as state-backed mass sterilization programs. Here we will examine some of these more recent attempts (in our area of Canada and the US) to limit reproductive freedom. Our focus is on the corporate and state-backed implementation of Norplant, and on the more street-based example of vigilantism practiced by a group calling themselves "Project Prevention", and on welfare reform projects in the past decade.[3] http://nefac.net/node/1925

Note: http://nefac.net/node/1925