Quotes from Dorothy Roberts

So let me be clear: race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people's health.

Turning people into gene carriers concentrates responsibility on them to manage their own genetic predispositions, shifting the spotlight away from state responsibility for ensuring healthy living conditions.

The federal government pays for sterilization services under the Medicaid program, while it does not make available information about and access to certain other contraceptive techniques and abortion.

Euginicists considered Southern Blacks to be especially unfit to breed based on a theory of "selective migration," which held that the more intelligent Blacks tended to migrate to the North, leaving the less intelligent ones behind. Selective migration was thought to explain the embarrassing finding that Blacks from Northern cities had scored higher on the army intelligence tests than some groups of Southern whites.

The language of eugenics did more than legitimate birth control. It defined the purpose of birth control, shaping the meaning of reproductive freedom. Birth control became a means of controlling a population rate rather than a means of increasing women's reproductive autonomy. Birth control in America was defined from the movement's inception in terms of race and could never be properly understood apart from race again.

As Daniel Kevles observed, "a river of blood would eventually run from the sterilization law of 1933 to Auschwitz and Buchenwald." Eugenic policy may be motivated by many forms of domination. But history shows that it has a particular affinity for racial hatred.

White eugenicists promoted birth control as a way of preserving an oppressive social structure; Blacks promoted birth control as a way of toppling it.

Black women's clubs worked to educate their less fortunate sisters about birth control as part of their racial uplift campaign.

She, like other whites in the birth control movement, saw the role of Black leaders and health professionals as facilitating their organizations' efforts among the Black population. They incorporated Blacks in their advocacy to help raise funds and to give legitimacy to the movement's projects in Black communities. But Black members of advisory councils were not invited to participate in national planning, nor were they allowed to manage the clinics that served Black patients.

A year later Matthew Rees, writing for the New Republic, similarly defended Norplant incentives on the ground that the current threat to children in our inner cities makes it an option that the morally serious can no longer simply dismiss. (Our inner cities and the underclass, of course, are another way of referring to the Black urban poor.)

Louisiana state representative and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke proposed paying women on welfare $100 a year to use [Norplant]. Duke's bill was an attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to enact concrete proposals to reduce the illegitimate birthrate and break the cycle of poverty that truly enslaves and harms the black race.

Men convicted of attempted rape or whom hospital authorities considered unruly were castrated to make them "easier to handle." Because they were not considered intelligent enough, none of the patients was asked for consent.

In one case, a teenage girl who was twelve weeks pregnant came to the Boston hospital for an abortion. She was told that it was too late for her to have a regular abortion and that a hysterectomy was necessary. When the medical student who observed the operation asked a resident why such drastic action was taken, the resident replied that the doctor "wanted a hysterectomy done for the experience.

Dr. C, chief of surgery at a northeastern hospital, for example, gave Corea his opinion that "a girl with lots of kids, on welfare, and not intelligent enough to use birth control, is better off being sterilized." " 'Not intelligent enough to use birth control,;' " Corea added, "is often a code phrase for 'black' or 'poor.

The doctor told her that the effect of the procedure "would wear off." Cox's mother consented to her daughter's sterilization under a North Carolina law that allowed sterilization of mental defectives under age twenty-one if their parent consented. Cox underwent the operation, which left her permanently infertile, although there was no evidence that she was mentally defective.

But that spring Washington had ordered an end to the hormonal injections when they were linked to cancer in laboratory animals. Instead, the Relfs later learned, their daughters were sterilized.

After surveying a number of these sterilization bills, Julius Paul observe in 1968, "The surgeon's knife (sterilization) still seems to have the same magical quality in the minds of some people for 'saving' America from its shame, squalor, and various miseries of human or social instigation (especially poverty) as it did over sixty years ago.

For small Indian tribes, this policy was literally genocidal. One physician that "[a]ll the pureblood women of the Kaw tribe of Oklahoma have now been sterilized. At the end of the generation the tribe will cease to exist.

For my parents, Iris and Robert Roberts, who taught me that there is only one human race.

By this I mean that millions of people are unqualified for parenthood and should remain childless, Ingle explained in the book's forewored.

Although most families on welfare are not Black, Blacks disproportionately rely on welfare to support their children. Black women are only 6 percent of the population, but they represent a third of AFDC recipients.

Although most people on welfare are not Black, many Americans think they are. The American public associates welfare payments to single mothers with the mythical black welfare queen, who deliberately becomes pregnant in order to increase the amount of her monthly check. The welfare queen represent laziness, chicanery, and economic burden all wrapped up in one powerful image.

Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.

Blaming Black mothers, then, is a way of subjugating the Black race as a whole. At the same time, devaluing motherhood is particularly damaging to Black women.