Population control or social control?  

Last week, I wrote a column about the politics of population control. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, this week I read the most heartbreaking article about forced sterilizations that took place in North Carolina between 1929 and 1974. During that time, 7,600 North Carolinians were sterilized. Eighty-five percent of the victims were female and at least 40 percent were non-white, according to an article on motherjones.com. Many of them were under 18, and a few of them were as young as nine years old.

North Carolina had an official “Eugenics Board” until 1977. Even more appalling and disgusting, some involuntary sterilization laws were still in effect until 2003, when the final sterilization law was finallyrepealed.

When I learned about eugenics in high school and college courses, it was usually in the context of Nazi Germany or American right-wing discourse in the early 20^th century. But eugenics still happening in America in the 1970s? That’s something I hadn’t been taught.

In this case, the rationale behind the sterilizations wasn’t population control in general, but about limiting the “wrong” populations. The legislatures and eugenicists in power believed that societal issues like poverty could be solved by getting rid of the genes that made certain people “prone” to poverty and unemployment.They were also intent on dehumanizing and limiting the size of the black population in North Carolina.

The article about the eugenics board features one victim, Elaine Riddick, who was raped and impregnated by a neighbor at age 14. Hours after she gave birth, she was sterilized without even realizing what had happened until she later tried to have more children. Doctors’ assessment of Elaine claimed that the 14-year-old was “promiscuous” and “feebleminded,” traits that they felt gave them the right to sterilize her, not only without her consent, but without even telling her what they’d done.

Of course, many people would insist that they support less extreme population control measures. But population control measures throughout history and throughout the world have too often been about social control, about limiting certain populations and about eliminating, rather than granting, the right to reproductive justice.

In 2013, for example, Israel admitted that it had been forcing Ethiopian Jewish women to take birth control without informing them of the drug’s effects. It seems likely that the Israeli government did this as part of a plan to limit the Jewish population from African countries, as Netanyahu had stated in 2012 that illegal immigrants from Africa “threaten our existence as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Similarly, a 2003 article in The New York Times reported that sterilizations continue to take place in India, a country grappling with a rapidly increasing population. The target population for sterilization is, unsurprisingly, poor young women.

“As it has been for nearly a half-century, India's family planning program remains dependent on female sterilization,” the article says.

Should we ignore the new demands and challenges our world faces with a growing population? Of course not. As I said in my last column, when family planning efforts are conducted in ways that educate and empower women, everybody wins. Population growth slows, standards of living increase and reproductive justice is achieved.

But we must acknowledge that birth control measures have so often been misguided and even genocidal. Furthermore, we should ask ourselves: are the U.S., U.S.-led NGOs and international organizations really fit to be implementing family planning strategies in fast-growing countries when we cannot even successfully implement them here? With Planned Parenthood under attack, the recent Hobby Lobby decision and similarly unjust laws like the one in North Carolina, it seems that the U.S. needs to think about its own “population control” efforts in order to address gender and economic inequality in this country.