Rebecca M. Kluchin, Fit to Be Tied

In Fit to Be Tied, Rebecca Kluchin explores why voluntary contraceptive sterilization, Americans' favoured form of long-term birth control, has flown under the historical radar. She reveals that voluntary sterilization emerged from the wreckage of the American eugenics movement, but remained overshadowed by the abortion debates. Even as voluntary sterilization increased upper-class, educated men's and women's access to permanent birth control, it enabled the mistreatment of marginalised populations, particularly poor women of colour. When political push came to policy shove, advocacy for poor women's rights to reproductive freedom and to bodily integrity often took a back seat to defending abortion. Although much of this story has been told before (for example, Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus, 1977), Kluchin's focus, judicious tone and original sources set a new benchmark. Kluchin traces voluntary sterilization back to America's eugenics movement. Traditional eugenic nostrums—involuntary sterilization, immigration restriction and anti-miscegenation laws—fell out of favour after the Second World War. Many former eugenicists, however, sought to salvage the perfectionist impulse that propelled their movement. What emerged was ‘neo-eugenics’, a heterogeneous, informal group of self-styled social reformers who were ‘less about preventing the "unfit" from reproducing and more about helping the "unfit" poor to limit their family size’, a subtle, but crucial, distinction (p. 28). This qualification lent neo-eugenics the patina of libertarian, reform humanism, replacing the authoritarianism of earlier eugenics with birth control's voluntarism. No less bigoted about class or race than their progenitors, neo-eugenicists were more politically savvy. Fear of the ‘population bomb’ replaced the ‘menace of the feebleminded’ and the ‘rising tide’ of immigration. Terms like ‘welfare queen’ and ‘pregnant pilgrim’ became ciphers for the ‘unfit’ in America's midst. While the cross-hairs remained on the poor and marginalised (people ever the target of eugenic reform), the solution was no longer explicitly state-sponsored genetic extinction. State subsidies for the voluntary sterilization of the poor, however, could have the same net eugenic effect

Abortion · Birth control · Eugenics · Family planning · Human rights · Political science · Population · Reproductive health · Reproductive rights · Sociology · Sterilization (economics · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History of Science and Medicine · Medical History and Research · Demography · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy