[Hamp-law] Poor Women, Poor Choices: Relf v. Weinberger, Race, and the Dilemma of Reproductive Policy in the 1970s

[Jennifer Hamilton]

Please join us this Wednesday for the first Law Café of the Semester:

 

*Poor Women, Poor Choices:  /Relf v. Weinberger/, Race, and the Dilemma 
of Reproductive Policy in the 1970s*

 

Dr. Gregory M. Dorr, Visiting Assistant Professor in Law, Jurisprudence, 
and Social Thought at Amherst College

 

Wednesday February 25th at 4pm

FPH 102

 

In 1973, the sterilization of two young African American girls in 
Montgomery, Alabama, prompted national outrage and revelations of a 
pattern of sterilization abuse targeting poor women, especially poor 
women of color.  Examining the federal court case (/Relf v. Weinberger/) 
that grew out of the Alabama childrens' sterilization reveals how an 
intensely personal event (sterilization) illustrates political dynamics 
at the local, state, national, and even international levels.  It 
demonstrates how the Nixon administration sought to use population 
policy to neutralize cross-cutting political tensions, simultaneously 
mollifying liberal and conservative activists.  It further reveals the 
persistence of eugenic ideas, as the focus of attempts to improve 
humanity shifted from "skimming the gene pool" to ensuring that only 
socially "fit" mothers procreated.  It also underscores the imbricated 
nature of race, class, and gender tensions in understanding and 
adjudicating the case.  Ultimately, in the name of protecting poor 
women, the courts established a procedure that actually limited their 
access to sterilization--then and today the favored form of long term 
birth control.  Women faced a paradoxical double bind as courts 
attempted to protect their reproductive autonomy by restricting their 
reproductive autonomy--an eerie echo of the Vietnam-era mantra that, "to 
save the village, we had to destroy the village."

 

*Biography*

Greg Dorr took his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth (1990) and did 
his graduate training at the University of Virginia (MA, 1994; Ph.D. 
2000).  He has taught at UVa., the University of Alabama, MIT, and 
Amherst College.  The University of Virginia Press published his book, 
"Segregation's Science:  Eugenics and Society in Virginia" this past 
December (get it while it's hot!).  He has published articles in the 
Journal of Southern History, the American Journal of Legal History, the 
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and the Journal of the Gilded Age 
and Progressive Era, as well as a number of essays in anthologies.  His 
talk is drawn from an essay which will appear in a forthcoming volume 
tentatively entitled, "100 Years of Eugenics:  From the "Indiana 
Experiment" to the Human Genome Era," edited by Paul Lombardo for 
Indiana University Press.

 

*/Refreshments will be served./*

-- 
Dr. Jennifer A. Hamilton
Assistant Professor of Legal Studies
School of Social Science
Hampshire College
Franklin Patterson Hall 208
893 West Street
Amherst, MA 01002

(413) 559-5578 (o)
(413) 559-5620 (f)
jhamilton at hampshire.edu
https://hampedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Hamilton

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