Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding

By Joann Wypijewski
The Nation
March 21, 2012

http://www.thenation.com/article/166961/reproductive-rights-and-long-hand-slave-breeding

I hate liberalism's language of "choice." I always
have. Redolent of the marketplace, it reduces the most
intimate aspects of existence, of women's physical
autonomy, to individualistic purchasing preferences. A
sex life or a Subaru? A child or a cheeseburger? Life,
death or liposuction? In that circumstance,
capitalism's only question is, Who pays and who
profits? The state's only question is, Who regulates
and how much? If there is an upside to the right's
latest, seemingly loony and certainly grotesque multi-
front assault on women, it is the clarion it sounds to
humanists to take the high ground and ditch the anodyne
talk of "a woman's right to choose" for the weightier,
fundamental assertion of "a woman's right to be."

That requires that we look to history and the
Constitution. I found myself doing that a few weeks
back, sitting in the DC living room of Pamela
Bridgewater, talking about slavery as the TV news
followed the debate over whether the State of Virginia
should force a woman to spread her legs and endure a
plastic wand shoved into her vagina. Pamela has a lot
of titles that, properly, ought to compel me to refer
to her now as Professor Bridgewater-legal scholar,
teacher at American University, reproductive rights
activist, sex radical-but she is my friend and sister,
and we were two women sitting around talking, so I
shall alternate between the familiar and the formal.

"What a spectacle," Pamela exclaimed, "Virginia, the
birthplace of the slave breeding industry in America,
is debating state-sanctioned rape. Imagine the woman
who says No to this as a prerequisite for abortion.
Will she be strapped down, her ankles shackled to stir-
ups?"

"I suspect," said I, "that partisans would say, `If she
doesn't agree, she is free to leave.'?"

"Right, which means she is coerced into childbearing or
coerced into taking other measures to terminate her
pregnancy, which may or may not be safe. Or she relents
and says Yes, and that's by coercion, too."

"Scratch at modern life and there's a little slave era
just below the surface, so we're right back to your
argument."

Pamela Bridgewater's argument, expressed over the past
several years in articles and forums, and at the heart
of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation:
Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom,
presents the most compelling conceptual and
constitutional frame I know for considering women's
bodily integrity and defending it from the right.

In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad
culture tells a standard story of the struggle for
reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper,
climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an
assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth
Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same
culture tells a traditional story of black
emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage,
climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War
and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscript-a
battle royal between liberation and reaction-but, as
Bridgewater asserts, "Taken together, these stories
have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective
tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and
no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive
slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a
mistake." What unites them but what both leave out,
except incidentally, is the experience of black women.
Most significantly, they leave out "the lost chapter of
slave breeding."

I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a
moment, because the considerable scholarship that
revisionist historians have done for the past few
decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The
mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms
of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men
in the enslaved population two to one by slavery's end,
but they enter the conventional story mainly under the
rubric "family," or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-
Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings.
Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually
exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great
nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation
in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe
rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US
depended on human beings not just as labor but as
reproducible raw material is not part of the story
America typically tells itself. That women had a
particular currency in this system, prized for their
sex or their wombs and often both, and that this
uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through
history to the present is not generally acknowledged.
Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X's
distinction between "the house Negro" and "the field
Negro," erases the female experience, the harrowing
reality of the "favorite" that Harriet Jacobs describes
in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

We don't commonly recognize that American slaveholders
supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that
they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting
their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the
primary focus: their bodies, their "stock," their
reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised
for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows
or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared
tips with one another on how to get maximum value out
of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as
studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls
together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated
new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and
had their physicians exploit female anatomy while
working to suppress African midwives' practice in areas
of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction
and its control became the planters' prerogative and
profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins
or jump out a window-abortion by suicide, except it was
hardly a sure thing.

This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela
details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this
open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom's Cabin
that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to
arrange books on her new shelves: "'If we could get a
breed of gals that didn't care, now, for their young
uns.would be 'bout the greatest mod'rn improvement I
knows on," says one slave hunter to another after Eliza
makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the
ice flows.

The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the
building blocks of Bridgewater's argument, which
continues thus. "If we integrate the lost chapter of
slave breeding into those two traditional but separate
stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to
coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for
emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive
freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive
narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive
freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom."

Constitutionally, the fundamental civil freedom is
enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment. The amendment's
language is unadorned, so it was left to the political
system to sort out what the abolition of slavery meant
in all particulars. In a series of successive legal
cases, the courts ruled that in prohibiting slavery the
amendment also prohibits what the judiciary called its
"badges and incidents," and recognized Congress's power
"to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing
all [of those] in the United States."

Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the
slaveholder's right to control the bodies and
reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced
reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced
labor. At the very least it qualifies among those
badges and incidents, certainly as much as the
inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and
reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy;
it is fundamental to our and the law's understanding of
human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that
freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they
effectively reinstitute slavery.

The courts and Congress of the nineteenth century
understood contracts, and even a little bit about
labor. Women they understood wholly by their sex and
wombs, and those they regarded as the property of
husbands once owners exited the stage. It is not our
fate to live with their failings. It is not our fate to
live with the failure of later courts to apply the
Thirteenth Amendment to claims for sexual and
reproductive freedom or even to consider the historical
context out of which the Fourteenth Amendment also
emerged. It is not our fate, in other words, to confine
ourselves to the pinched language of choice or even of
privacy-or to the partial, white-centric history of
women's struggle for reproductive rights.

Since that conversation in Pamela's living room, the
anti-woman spring offensive has come on in full.
Virginia lawmakers ended up imposing a standard
ultrasound mandate rather than the "transvaginal"
version, one of at least ninety-two new regulations or
restrictions that states have imposed on abortion since
2011, and one of at least 155 introduced in state
legislatures since the start of the year. Rush Limbaugh
revealed himself to be astoundingly ignorant of female
sexuality. Rick Santorum demonstrated many times over
that, for him, no idea in "the sexual realm" is too
outlandish. They and their anti-woman allies have
lobbed so many bombs it's easy to get distracted, to
assume a posture of defensive, and sometimes
politically dicey, defense: but no federal money pays
for abortion; women who delay child-bearing are more
productive; the Pill eases painful periods; most of
what Planned Parenthood does has nothing to do with
abortion; contraceptives help against rheumatoid
arthritis; Mrs. Santorum might have died under the
fetal personhood platforms her husband touts; Sandra
Fluke is not a slut.

What of it if she were? By any other name, ain't she a
woman? A human being? The descendants of slave masters
have no more right to control her sexuality and
reproductive organs, to deny her self-determination,
than did their predecessors. Mother or slut, prostitute
or daughter, law student or lazybones who just wants to
have sex all day, she is heir in her person to a
promise of universal freedom, one that does not make
such distinctions but that recognizes an individual's
right to her life, her labor, her body and self-
possession all as one. Forget trying to shut up a
gasbag on the radio; there is a basic constitutional
liberty to uphold.

The preachers and lay men and women now raising the
"personhood" banner for their side have taken to
calling the fetus and fertilized egg the new slave, and
the movement for their legal personhood the new civil
rights movement. The director of Personhood Florida
compares himself to William Wilberforce, the
nineteenth-century English abolitionist. A Catholic
priest posting on Planned Parenthood's "I Have a Say"
video thread likens defenders of women's bodily
autonomy to slave traders. On their blogs and other
propaganda the foot soldiers of this movement call Roe
v. Wade a latter-day Dred Scott decision; they invoke
the Thirteenth Amendment and vow to fulfill its
promise.

These people are not stupid, and some are sincere, but
they are wrong. They pervert morality and history in
the guise of honoring both, and thing-ify women
according to the logic of our cruelest past. There is
another logic, and it calls us to complete the
unfinished business of emancipation.
______________

JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer in New York. She does a
regular column for The Nation called "Carnal Knowledge"
and can be reached at [log in to unmask]

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