[PEN-L:12030] Re: Swedish sterilizations & SDs

[MScoleman@xxxxxxx]

Wellllll, if one wants to throw mud around about forced sterilization, there
are few who will come away clean.  I think the trite adage, s/he who lives in
a glass house shouldn't throw stones, is probably the wisest thing to say.

The feminist/suffragette/women's lib movement (the century and decade
determine the tag), as MEN are always so quick to point out, has certainly
been contradictory on issues of abortion and sterilisation.  Early women's
rights doctors probably did think poor women should be sterilized (as upper
class, educated women, they were also the only ones providing medical care to
poor and working class women--somehow this 'fact' always gets dropped).

In this they share common beliefs with all those twentieth century
right-to-lifers who are opposed to abortion AND in favor of policies which
sterilize welfare women (court ordered norplant insertions, forced tube
tieing, end of welfare with additional pregnancies).  Throughout the
twentieth century there have been moves to sterilize Puerto Rican women,
welfare women, African American women, Indian women...  In fact, the only
group of women in the States exempt from forced sterilization attempts during
the twentieth century are middle and upper income Caucasian women.  These are
the women whom the right wing wants to keep from having abortions--the old
double standard.  White women who have careers are bad mothers while minority
women who stay home with their children on welfare are lazy.

The politically correct tone represented by Naral and other women's groups in
the last twenty-twenty five years is relatively new--that all women are
intelligent enough to control their own bodies both to have and not have
children has not been an historically prevalent or popular concept.

          Just a few juicy, stylized facts which you can all use, abuse,
disregard or wax indignant about as you choose:
--Thalidomide is still dispensed in South America as a cure for leprosy.  It
finds its way into the hands of women of child bearing years and there is a
whole new generation of thalidomide babies growing up in south america.
--According to Mary Ryan (historian), as many as one in five pregnancies
terminated in abortion in the USA during the 1850s-60s.  Abortion did not
become illegal in the USA until the twentieth century.
--Dalkon shields (a kind of iud), illegal for decades in the USA because they
tear the wall of the uterus and cause death by hemorage, are still exported
overseas.
--The father of modern gynecology (sorry, without looking in my notes, I
can't recall his name), developed most of his operating techniques for uterus
removal and sterilization on plantation slave women--sans anaethesiology (no
pain killers).
--By the 1830s, virtually all children of parents applying for both private
and public charity in the northeast (Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Maine) were removed and either indentured out or put into
orphanages.  This accomplished three things, children were inculcated with
the proper education to make them servants and wage workers, the parents'
labor was freed up to accept any low wage work offered, and women having more
children were then denied charity because they were immoral and not deserving
of aid.  (gee, wow, does this sound familiar or what :))

maggie coleman mscoleman@xxxxxxx
(disclaimer: I am not responsible for the uses made of these bits of
information)