The conservative id speaks
by digby
Out of the mouth of Russell Pearce, vice chair of the Arizona Republican party and the mover and shaker behind Arizona’s odious SB 1070:
“You put me in charge of Medicaid, the first thing I’d do is get Norplant, birth-control implants, or tubal ligations. Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs and alcohol, and if you want to [reproduce] or use drugs or alcohol, then get a job.”
They actually made him resign. Finally. Apparently you can go too far even for Arizona Republicans to tolerate.
But as Bryce Covert at Think Progress points out, these sentiments have been informing conservative and centrist policy on this for decades:
The Nixon administration pushed through funding for serializations in the 1970s aimed mostly a low-income people, usually women of color, and many were done involuntarily. And while it may sound like long-ago history, the practice of sterilizing low-income women hasn’t been entirely done away with. Between 2005 and 2013, 39 tubal ligations were given to women in California’s prison system without full consent. The majority of those were performed by Dr. James Heinrich, who has said of the practice, “Over a ten-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more.” The state is now considering banning inmate sterilization.
In the absence of outright sterilization, there are other policies that rely on the ugly idea that low-income women need to be stopped from having children. While in most states, families receive more welfare benefits when they have additional children, 16 have family caps that ban any extra money for new children if someone in the household is already receiving aid. There’s no evidence that these policies keep women from having more children, as they are intended to do, but there is evidence that they push people further into poverty and can lead to higher death rates.
You have to love the fact that conservatives who are now arguing against birth control (all the way up to the Supreme Court) and want to ban abortion for everyone are also people who want to require contraception or forcibly sterilize poor women. It kind of shines a light on their real intentions doesn’t it?
Of course it isn’t just Republicans. Democrats made a whole lot of noise about “welfare reform” during the 90s, with the sub-text always being that women on welfare we being encouraged to have “too many children” and they needed to “go to work.” They shouldn’t be let off the hook. It was as opportunistic in its way as the Southern Strategy was for Republicans.
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