Contraception Mandates, Population Control

The debate over the new Health and Human Services regulations,
which require all employers to pay 100 percent of the cost of
contraception including abortion-inducing chemicals, has been rightly
cast as an intrusion on religious liberty. Opponents of such
regulations are no more advocating a ban on contraceptives than
vegetarian restaurants are advocating a ban on meat. They are simply
saying that companies shouldn’t have to pay for services to which
they object for moral reasons.

But black Americans in particular would be wise to pay close
attention, since the age old contraception battle has special
historical significance to them. For more than a century,
“reproductive services” have been special code words for the
constant, silent effort of the powerful to control black breeding.
And this control has often come in the form of a “helping hand.”

From the earliest days of our nation, people in power have wanted
to control black reproduction. Before the Civil War, slave owners had
a financial interest in increasing the birthrate among their slaves.
This was a matter of simple economics; even before the transatlantic
slave trade was outlawed, it had become cheaper to “breed” your
slaves than to import new ones. Female slaves were pressured to
become pregnant (often they were raped).

After emancipation, black birthrates (and marriage rates) were
higher than whites, causing great concern in the growing movement
known as Eugenics. An elite group of whites began to see the growth
of the black population as a direct threat to their community. Blacks
at this time actually had a higher employment rate than whites,
because black men were willing to work for lower wages. In a time
when many intellectuals were becoming paranoid about overpopulation,
some began to fear that blacks would compete with whites for the
resources needed to survive.

Powerful whites no longer wanted blacks to make more babies that
they could enslave; now they wanted blacks to stop having babies that
would compete for their jobs or overcrowd their cities. Their goals
changed from forcing them to breed to preventing them from breeding.

Thus in modern times, no people group has been plied with more
contraceptives than African-Americans. People willing to turn a blind
eye to the obvious still aren’t convinced about whether abortion is
aggressively marketed to blacks. But there can be no confusion about
contraception being pushed on black women from the time they are
middle school students to even the most highly educated married
women. And in a way it is working: Despite a terrifyingly high 70
percent illegitimacy rate, the black American population continues to
decline as a percentage of the American population.

But all of this was marketed as freedom, not control. Universal
access to birth control, we were told, was to give women the freedom
that men had supposedly enjoyed all along: consequence-free sex.
Methods became increasingly convenient: first the pill, then the
shot, then the implant. When Depo Provera (the contraceptive
injection) was being developed between 1972 and 1978, poor black
women in Atlanta were used as laboratory rats in the clinical trial.
More than 9,000 women were injected with Depo Provera at Grady
Hospital in Atlanta, in what became known later as the Grady Trials.
Years later it was revealed that the women were not given sufficient
information about the risks of the drug, nor were they informed that
they were part of a trial to test the drug’s fitness for human
usage.

According to a 2004 report from the Centers for Disease Control,
black women are still twice as likely to be prescribed Depo Provera
as white women. And while no one has studied the effects of Depo
Provera on black women, one of its riskiest side effects is blood
clots, and recent studies suggest that African-Americans are at least
30 percent more likely to suffer from blood clots than members of
other races.

We now face a terrible irony about childbearing in the black
community: Fatherless teenagers often intentionally have a baby so
that someone will love them, while college-educated black women fear
that a baby will ruin their lives. In addition to teens failing to
properly use the free birth control thrown at them daily in our
schools, married black women abort their babies five times as often
as married white women.

The black community does not need more birth control. We need men
and women who respect their bodies and raise their children to do the
same. We should put more energy and effort into educating people to
make wise choices in relationships and being a family instead of
mandating how they make those choices. Let’s let our
representatives know how we feel!

Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr. is the senior
pastor of Hope Christian Church, a 3,000-member congregation in the
Washington, D.C., area. He is also the guest editor of the
January-February 2012 issue of Ministry Today about social
transformation.