As for the CDC?s pretense of concern for the high infant mortality rates among uninsured, poor and oppressed women, it is stark: for instance, the mortality rates for infants born to Black women in Brooklyn are comparable to the rates many Third World countries. But, when you get right down to it, this report has potentially genocidal implications.
It talks of intensive interventions into the lives of women who are at high risk, singling out race and economics as determining factors. But the ?interventions? are not aimed at solving the conditions that cause women to be poor, to lack health care, or to be trapped in abusive relationships. Rather, the report blueprints a way to exploit these women?s poor conditions to further intrude into, and even criminalize women for, their intimate affairs and every aspect of their lives.
Let?s not forget this country?s long and shameful history of removing children from Native Americans who were deemed unfit to raise them. Or its history of forced sterilization of Black and Puerto Rican women without health care, who came to hospitals to give birth.*
This is a report that concentrates a viciously immoral stance towards half of humanity. It needs to be answered: by scientists and doctors taking on its recommended strategies, by social scientists and historians bringing to light what has happened before in places like Nazi Germany when all women were classified as breeders, and most of all by millions of outraged women and men who refuse to march forward into a real-life Handmaid?s Tale.
*Reports of this practice continued up until the 1970s. See Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, by Dorothy Roberts, or Judith A.M. Scully, ?Maternal mortality, Population Control, and the War in Women's Wombs: A bioethical analysis of quinacrine sterilizations?, in 19 Wisconsin International Law Journal 103.
It talks of intensive interventions into the lives of women who are at high risk, singling out race and economics as determining factors. But the ?interventions? are not aimed at solving the conditions that cause women to be poor, to lack health care, or to be trapped in abusive relationships. Rather, the report blueprints a way to exploit these women?s poor conditions to further intrude into, and even criminalize women for, their intimate affairs and every aspect of their lives.
Let?s not forget this country?s long and shameful history of removing children from Native Americans who were deemed unfit to raise them. Or its history of forced sterilization of Black and Puerto Rican women without health care, who came to hospitals to give birth.*
This is a report that concentrates a viciously immoral stance towards half of humanity. It needs to be answered: by scientists and doctors taking on its recommended strategies, by social scientists and historians bringing to light what has happened before in places like Nazi Germany when all women were classified as breeders, and most of all by millions of outraged women and men who refuse to march forward into a real-life Handmaid?s Tale.
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