“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (Statue of Liberty), is the message found on the plaque on the Statue of Liberty. It inspires hope of a new life, an opportunity available to anyone. Yet policy and rhetoric in the United States oppose the ideals promoted by the lady of the liberty. People of color have historically had less chance of upward mobility than white people, especially women of color. Freedom of reproduction is not only the ability to choose but includes accessibility and reproductive education. The idea of the hotentot venus, the welfare queen, young Latina mothers, and people of color being criminals are stereotypes that describe black and brown communities upheld by policy. Washington pushes out policy and rhetoric that has promoted the non-consensual sterilization of black and brown women.
The hottentot portrayal of beauty competes with the white Eurocentric beauty standards, attempts to demonize black sexuality were successful, and now play into the rhetoric of black women as the welfare queen, “Black females do not merely represent the sexualized female, they also represent the female as the source of corruption and disease” (Gilman, 1985). Reproduction of Black women was seen as corrupt and used as discourse to defend skewed political morality. Policymakers and administrations taking advantage of harmful rhetoric to turn moral arguments into policy ones, causing discrimination not only horizontally but vertically as well. To demonize welfare, “Ronald Reagan transformed the ‘welfare queen’ into a weapon of class warfare,…candidates…emboldened by the recession to make welfare a seminal political issue” (Harvard Law Review, 1994). Class warfare caused by rhetoric and policy cuts off opportunities for upward mobility limiting access to (sex) education, exposure to harmful environments and access to quality health care. The idea of who gets to reproduce on American Soil is a privilege that still has not been fully awarded to black and brown women a whistleblower in 2020 gave information on forced sterilization at the boarder and detention center, “medical neglect and abuse, claiming that numerous involuntary hysterectomies (uterus removal surgeries) were performed on detained immigrant women” (Berkeley Review 2020).Policy and procedures pushing the sterilization of black and brown women are still prevalent to the day.
.Just as rhetoric of the welfare queen having kids to keep on receiving government subsidies, Latina women were prone to being ‘feeble minded.’ California has a long-forgotten history of forced and state sponsored sterilization from the early nineteen hundreds to late nineteen seventies. No Mas Bebes gives first person accounts of women who during or after giving birth under duress, were coerced into signing away their reproductive freedom. It follows the Madrigall v. Quilligan civil rights lawsuit,“the needs of poor women and women of color be heard resonates powerfully, as women’s reproductive choice is under attack and the reproductive justice movement struggles to ensure that all women have a voice in the debate” (Tajima-Pena & Espino, & Tajima-Pena, 2015). The precedent of this decision was set through judicial policy made in 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, when the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Virginia’s sterilization law. The Buck v Bell decision has one of the most memorable quotes from justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “three generations of imbeciles are enough” Buck v Bell has not formally been overturned and has allowed forced sterilizations of across the United States. The Buck v Bell decision was fueled by the rhetoric of the undesirables and the feeble minded that allowed the violation of multiple women across the United States.
In conclusion the sterilization of black and brown women is not new to the United States and is still prevalent today. There must be reform that goes against the policy this is passed based on rhetoric of the undesirables in Washington. The hottentot Venus, the welfare queen, and anti-immigrant sentiment are some of the driving rhetoric pushed by Washington. Cases such as Buck v Bell, Madrigall v Quilligan, show how this rhetoric has harmed these communities sterilization happening not only through uteral removal but by cutting funding to social programs, and education that keep people in cyclical poverty leading them to seek permanent forms of birth control.
