Last week, Louisiana state representative John LaBruzzo suggested that economic disparity and crisis might be lessened by the sterilization of the poor who, he must believe, are a burden on the U.S. economic system and should be scapegoated for a crisis of corporations.
LaBruzzo said he worries that people receiving government aid such as food stamps and publicly subsidized housing are reproducing at a faster rate than more affluent, better-educated people who presumably pay more tax revenue to the government. He said he is gathering statistics now.
Though it’s reported that the program LaBruzzo is considering might include vasectomies for men “to avoid charges of gender discrimination,” his primary target is women, to whom he would offer $1,000 to undergo tubal ligation. However:
It also could include tax incentives for college-educated, higher-income people to have more children, he said.
So it’s not fewer children he wants on behalf of North Americans, it’s less children born to poor women, primarily women of color. Bad economic policy is not an apt cover for this sort of discrimination.
Now, my point is not only to point fingers at this one guy. Taken from a response written by the Women’s Health and Justice Initiative and the New Orlean’s Women’s Health Clinic and posted at Elle, Phd, LaBruzzo’s plan is but one example of the injustices that spring from the overlapping ideologies and culturally integrated practices of: eugenics, reproductive violence, sterilization abuse, devaluation of poor women’s sexuality and motherhood (and fatherhood, I would add), and other classic -ism’s.
Even if sterilization is voluntary, POVERTY IS NOT! Poverty, economic insecurity, and lack of sustainable livelihood can cause a woman to consider this aggressive sterilization incentive a viable option.
LaBruzzo talks about poverty as though it were an infectious disease—a though poor people will eventually make everyone poor—rather than a condition people are condemned to by Louisiana’s lack of investment in education, employment, affordable housing, and quality health care programs, services, and resources…
We are basically witnessing a two front war against poor and working class black communities right now. On one hand, we have the Bush administration fighting to push an economic corporate welfare bailout plan to save Wall Street, and on the other, we have an elected official blaming the bodies and reproductive decisions of poor black women for the social conditions caused by corporate greed.
Story via Womanist Musings.
Also, more on blaming people of color for the economic meltdown of late at Feministe.
Posted under Economy, Politics
This post was written by Emily on September 29, 2008
hmmm… i’m not against the notion of incentivized sterilization per se. seems to me that many wealthy people make poor reproductive choices – that is, choices that might make sense for them, but are harmful for society. for example, they have children, who for the most part end up as a drain on the public treasury and whose assets are irresponsibly invested in financial instruments that destabilize the economy rather than producing stable growth. rich people’s natural affection toward their children makes them want their children to be rich, too, and the measures that they take in support of this desire perpetuates the class system.
my proposal: a wealth tax, a la huey long, with the ability to opt out of the tax by getting sterilized.
there’s much less of a moral issue with voluntary sterilization of the rich, because (1) they’re way more parasitic than the poor; (2) they are collectively way more responsible for oppression than the poor are; (3) they have a much greater ability to defend themselves than the poor do; and (4) there’s no danger of rich people being so needy that they are forced to undergo sterilization in order to meet basic needs.
LaBruzzo is, unfortunately, not the first person to suggest sterilization as a corrective social policy (see forced sterilization of Native Americans and the mentally disabled in the U.S., in the slums of India under Indira Ghandi, and others).
That the outcome of people with more wealth and resources (who thus have the ability and privilege to manage their reproductive choices) have less children should not be of particular shock, and certainly not a statistical novelty. The clear lesson here for people with a sense humanity is not to incentivize sterilization, but to work to reduce and eliminate poverty!
Uri,
I can’t count the number of ways a sterilization driven wealth tax would backfire politically and socially. Bad idea.
Jeff,
I agree, we ought to be working to reduce poverty on the way towards eliminating it.
Emily,
Another spin on this is that the bill itself is free advertising. If he wants to paint himself as an opponent of government spending, he’s just pulling out the familiar target of the “welfare queen”.
Uri: My proposal would be to ensure everyone access to proper health care, including the options and means to pursue any reproductive path- or path of prevention!- of their choosing, regardless of their economic standing. I disagree that a sterilization driven wealth tax would effectively counter any problems or could be implemented without coercion given our political/cultural climate, and agree with Dan that it would surely only encourage more.
Jeff: Indeed. Nice conclusion.
Dan: Yes, that’s surely a part of this scheme.
dan, you wouldn’t know a good sterilization proposal if it bit you in the vas.
i thought it was clear that my proposal was tongue-in-cheek, but i guess that didn’t come across. i still maintain, seriously, that sterilization of the rich would have the kinds of benefits that i suggested, and is significantly less problematic than sterilization of the poor. i reject the position that coercion would be involved – it would be purely voluntary as an alternative to the noncoercive wealth tax, which makes it noncoercive. now, if you think the wealth tax is coercive, i disagree but that’s a different issue.
Heh.
I think Uri that sterilization is always going to be problematic with the vast socioeconomic differences in our social castes.
The other side of this Republican’s proposal is that it includes racist hand-wringing about the populations of one race overtaking another. Nevermind a leap its not even a step to pull that logic out of a kkk/ccc playbook. Sterilization plays right into that fire.
One might argue profitably where there is money there is coercion.