Black History Month Thread #8: "Did You Know?" (Abortion)

[Hissyspit]

Every day for the rest of February, I am posting some form of interesting information regarding African American history.

African American Women and Abortion Rights

Early 20th Century
Well before the Hyde Amendment in 1977 took away Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women, in the early part of the 20th century, within the more general American social context of the reproductive rights revolution (including the work of Margaret Sanger), "the black women's club movement supported the establishment of family-planning clinics in Black communities. In 1918 the Women's Political Association of Harlem became the first Black organization to schedule lectures on birth control... The National Urban League requested that the Birth Control Federation of America (the forerunner to Planned Parenthood) open a clinic in the Columbus Hill section of the Bronx in 1925. ...In 1931, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell of the Abyssinian Baptist Church spoke at public meetings in support of family planning."

Various newspapers serving the African American community, the National Urban League and the NAACP pressed the need for family planning. "The Black press espoused this strategy as a means for uplifting the race, perhaps partially in response to the economic ravages of the Depression. The African-American newspapers of the period also reported the mortality rate of women who had septic abortions and championed the causes (of) African American doctors who were arrested for performing illegal abortions," according to Loretta Ross: The Baltimore Afro-American wrote that pencils, nails, and hat pins were instruments commonly used for self-induced abortions, and that abortions among Black women were deliberate, not the spontaneous result of poor health or sexually transmitted diseases. Statistics on abortions among African-American women are scarce, but 28 percent of Black women surveyed by an African-American doctor in Nashville in 1940 said they had had at least one abortion. This was the social situation within a context, that, as well, included the influence of the eugenics movement.

1950s
"The majority of abortions available to African-American women in the 1950s and early 1960s were provided by doctors, midwives, and quacks operating illegally. Little information is available regarding the Black midwives who provided abortions, except for arrest records and court transcripts. Information on physicians is slightly more accessible. For example, Dr. Edward Keemer, a Black physician in Detroit, practiced outside the law for more than thirty years until his arrest in I956. He was sent to prison for fourteen months and afterward sold vacuum cleaners in New Jersey until he was able to win reinstatement of his medical license in the early 1960s. His assistant, LaBrentha Hurley, was jailed for sixty days and had to fight to get her children back after she was released. When Keemer resumed his practice, he continued openly to defy the law. By this time, he had become militant in the fight for reproductive rights. At a 1971 press conference held by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, Keemer described an illegal abortion he had performed the previous day and pledged he would continue to save women's lives, whatever the consequences. He and his assistant were rearrested several days later and again faced prosecution." (Ross)

Even as standardized hospital practices did emerge, according to Ross, African American lay midwives, whose ancestry linked back to slavery, continued to practice in the South, providing "most of the abortion and contraceptive services" for African American women. These women, technically functioning illegally, "developed informal networks of communication" to share contraceptive and abortion information.

1960s
By the late 1960s family planning became once again "synonymous with the civil rights of poor women to medical care." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., reflected this re-emergent belief that family planning rights were a important aspect of the civil rights movement: In 1966 he wrote in a Planned Parenthood publication that family planning is "a special and urgent concern" for African Americans and "a profoundly important ingredient in quest for security and a decent life." Studies found that "when contraceptives were unavailable and abortion was illegal, septic abortions were a primary killer of African-American women. One study estimated that 80 percent of deaths caused by illegal abortions in New York in the 1960s involved Black and Puerto Rican women. In Georgia between 1965 and 1967 the Black maternal death rate due to illegal abortion was fourteen times that of white women."

"If complications developed from illegal abortions, women visited physicians who operated in the poorer sections of the city... Dr. Joe Beasley, who helped establish one of the country's first statewide family-planning programs in Louisiana in the 1960s, observed that the leading causes of maternal mortality were the medical complications of criminal or medically unsupervised abortions:

The other thing we saw was tremendous problems of induced abortion, with the highest predominance in the lower socioeconomic group, and the middle and the upper getting more expensive abortions. So we see women very carved up--very crude abortions-knitting needles, cloth packing. And we see them coming in highly febrile, puerperal discharge in the vagina, germs in their blood, blood poisoning, septicemia, and those who survive have a very high probability of being reproductive cripples... then when we looked at it, there was a very low pattern of contraception in the lower socioeconomic group, in spite of what seemed to be a very strong desire not to have unwanted children ... I mean, if a woman will risk her very life with a criminal abortion, that's pretty damn strong motivations.

Dangerous, self-administered procedures probably killed many women. Nurses reported that 'sticks, rocks, chopsticks, rubber or plastic tubes, gauze or cotton packing, ball-point pens, coat hangers, or knitting needles" were frequently used by desperate women. Or they chose to use douches believed effective in inducing abortions made from detergents, orange juice, vinegar, bleach, disinfectant, lye, potassium permanganate, or colas. The gaseous explosions of soft drinks said to cause a miscarriage; some teenagers considered them spermicidal.' Clearly Black women needed and wanted abortion and contraception services. But few had access to safe and affordable treatment."

More Recently
A 1989 brochure from African American Women for Reproductive Freedom: "Somebody owned our flesh, and decided if and when and with whom and how our bodies were to be used. Somebody said that Black women could be raped, held in concubinage, forced to bear children year in and year out, but often not raise them."

In 1991 a poll found that 83 percent of African Americans support some level of abortion rights.

Actor Whoopi Goldberg holding up wire coat hangers during the March for Women's Lives, April 25, 2004 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.; photo source National Organization for Women. (Note: Possibly the largest protest ever held on the Mall.)


SOURCE:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/Organizations/healthnet/WoC/reproductive/ross.html
Melanie Tervalon, "Black Women's Reproductive Rights," in Women's Health: Readings on Social, Economic and Political Issues, ed. Nancy Worcester and Marianne H. Whatley (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1988).
www.now.org

Yesterday's Black History Month Thread #7: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=496690&mesg_id=496690

[Hissyspit]

1. self-kick

[Blue_Tires]

2. ttt n/t

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. Excellent information. Did not know most of that. K&R

[LisaLynne]

4. Great info ...

Are you keeping a list of all of your posts for the month? Maybe you could do a big list of all of them at the end of the month or something!

[Hissyspit]

13. Yes, I will Lisa. The compilation will probably be posted on March 1 or 2.

You can actually follow them all through now to the first one by clicking on the link at the bottom in each succeeding post (yesterday's, though, I put the link to the previous day's one in a reply because I forgot to put it in the main post).

[EFerrari]

5. Kick, God, I love that woman. KIck!

:kick:

[Hissyspit]

6. Can you identify the women to the immediate right and left of Whoopi?

Grand prize is a smiley from me.

[EFerrari]

7. I cannot and I even tried to cheat by asking Doug

to peek because he has a Sony memory. And he came up empty, too.

Who are they? :)


/typo

[Hissyspit]

8. Sybil Shepard on the left side of photo; Kathleen Turner on right.

Here's a smiley anyway!

:loveya:

[EFerrari]

9. Kathleen Turner! I knew I knew those cheek bones.

lol

Boy, Doug is just gonna hate this. :evilgrin:

[Hissyspit]

10. Oops. I got it reversed.

Sorry, I fixed it. Shepard is on the LEFT (Whoopi's right).

[EFerrari]

11. I love these threads, even if they show how little I know.

Thank you so very much, Hissy. :)

[Hissyspit]

12. More on the Eugenics crap:

"In the United States, eugenics proponents believed that the future of native-born whites in America was threatened by the increasing population of people of color and whites who were not of Nordic-Teutonic descent. The eugenics movement not only affected the thinking in social Darwinist scientific circles, but it also grew to affect public policy, receiving the endorsement of President Calvin Coolidge, who said in 1924, 'America must be kept American. Biological laws show ... that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.' President Theodore Roosevelt condemned the tendency toward smaller family sizes among white women as race suicide. He denounced family planning as 'criminal against the race.'"

There became prominent an attitude that minority women had an obligation to restrict the size of their families, and birth control was often seen as, not a right as it was for privileged women, but an obligation, to paraphrase Ross. There were protests to these ideas within the African American community, however.

[AspenRose]

14. "America must be kept American."

And to this day the prevalent thinking among right wing white people continues to be white=American.

That's why it was so much easier for ethnic whites to blend in and "become white" after a few generations.

Never mind if you're a person of color whose ancestors have been here hundreds of years (whether American Indian, African American, etc.) and your bloodline has been mixed with 'anglo' blood. You will always be seen as (insert color or ethnicity here)-HYPHEN-American. In this country, that will always be first and will always define you.

Europeans and Canadians I've known don't understand this.

[NMMNG]

17. And that is why many of the fundies have such huge families

They want to make sure they keep America white (as well as fundie). And the best way to do that is to work overtime to populate it with "their kind". In the meantime they do their best to prevent others from keeping up by making discriminatory laws against blacks, Latinos, gays, the poor and so on.

[chalky]

15. I picked up a copy of Sanger's "Woman and the New Race" at an

estate sale a couple of years ago. I didn't know anything about her, other than that she was prominent in early feminism.

I alternated between nodding in agreement and feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand on end as I tried to read the book.

I don't know. Maybe it was the phraseology she used (which I'll concede was just the "language of that time"). Maybe it was reading it through the filter of my family's experience of life in the US during the time the book was written. Maybe it was just the damned title that skeeved me out.

Let's just say I couldn't finish it.

[Hissyspit]

16. No, you're right. She definitely advocated some disturbing ideas.

I left that all out of the final post:

When the movement for birth control began, organizers like Margaret Sanger believed that fertility control was linked to upward social mobility for all women, regardless of race or immigrant status. Because the medical establishment largely opposed birth control, Sanger initially emphasized woman-controlled methods that did not depend on medical assistance. Her arguments persuaded middle-class women, both Black and white, to use birth control when available.

Sanger's immediate effect on African-American women was to help transform their covert support for and use of family planning into the visible public support of activists in the club movement. But African-American women envisioned an even more pointed concept of reproductive justice: the freedom to have, or not to have, children.

The early feminism of the birth control movement, which promoted equality and reproductive rights for all women regardless of race or economic status, collapsed under the weight of support offered by the growing number of nativist whites. Under the influence of eugenicists, Sanger changed her approach, as did other feminists. In 1919 her American Birth Control League began to rely heavily for legitimacy on medical doctors and the growing eugenics movement.

The eugenics movement provided scientific and authoritative language that legitimated women's right to contraception. This co-optation of the birth control movement produced racist depopulation policies and doctor-controlled birth control technology.

One such program was the Negro Project, designed by Sanger's Birth Control Federation in 1939. It hired several African-American ministers to travel through the South to recruit African-American doctors. The project proposal included a quote by W.E.B. DuBois, saying that "the mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among Whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly." This quote, often mistakenly attributed to Sanger, reflected the shared race and class biases of the project's founders.

[Gelliebeans]

18. Thank you for posting this

K&R :kick:

[Hissyspit]

19. self-kick for the Friday morning crowd

[Hissyspit]

20. One last kick for what is a topical post

Thanks to the great state of South Dakota. :sarcasm: