fertility of nonwelfare women in cooperation with the men whose
interests it represents: the men who are lovers, fathers, husbands,
rapists, and police all at the same time. But the state directly
the sexuality of women on welfare— at least from its point of view
it does— and it wants to own their fertility outright too. Sometimes
the state explicitly exercises the ownership it has in enforcing so-
called moral standards for a subject group of women: sometimes it
punishes women for having had children against its w ill. The slow
starving and degrading of these women is not yet w idely viewed as
genocidal; genocide is not articulated as state policy. That is because the political and legal tools available to welfare in its pursuit of reproductive control of poor women have been crude. But illegal
abortion, which looms large on the horizon in the form of the monstrous Human Life Amendment, and forced sterilization, practiced sporadically so far but lurking for decades as what the government
really wants to do, w ill make a genocidal policy practical, effective,
and frankly inevitable. When abortion is illegal, black women, H ispanic women, and poor women get slaughtered. * Allowing the government to regulate the uterus— as in the Human Life Amendment— w ill directly preface an overt policy of forced sterilization.
Forced sterilization cannot be explicit state policy until a measure
like the Human Life Amendment is adopted: until abortion is absolutely reckoned murder legally and is punished as murder, so that the state is empowered literally to investigate the woman’s womb,
her menses, her discharges. Once every fertilized egg must be
*See chapter 3, “Abortion, ” pp. 9 8 -9 9 .
brought to term, what are we to do with all those poor, promiscuous, dumb sluts who keep having bastards? After all, doesn’t the government have the right to force such women to stop having
babies? isn’t the government paying for them? aren’t those women
immoral, fucking around and having babies for the money? If
every fertilized egg is going to be brought to term—under penalty
of a murder charge for failing to discharge that obligation—isn’t it
best just to insist that women taking government money have their
tubes tied? And doesn’t this combination of illegal abortion—prohibited in a way never existing before, prohibited from conception—and forced sterilization finally meet the not-so-hidden agenda of welfare: doesn’t it finally provide the state with a way to
control—absolutely and effectively—the fertility of poor women?
Enough poor women can be kept having enough babies to provide
whatever cheap labor is essential; but the rest are expendable.
And what is going to happen to women, these women and all
women, when the tools of reproductive control of women are no
longer technologically (medically) crude? when the technology
catches up with the political and legal leap into the Orwellian future? What is going to happen to women when life can be made in the laboratory and men can control reproduction not just socially
but also biologically with real efficiency?
The value of a female life is determined by its reproductive
value. What will happen to all the women who are not altogether
necessary because
old women incarcerated in cruel nursing homes are there because
their reproductive lives are over and they are worth nothing. The
women who are too poor or too black or brown and who have too
many children are starved and threatened and degraded and slowly
killed through state-sponsored neglect
disregard. The women who are kept in line now, millions upon
millions of them each year, through the judicious application of
mood-altering drugs, are kept chem ically happy, calm, tranquil, or
energetic so that they w ill hang in there, have and raise the children and keep house for their husbands even though their lives fill them with distress and addiction is what keeps them conforming.
T hey too are part of a throwaway population of females: because
their own well-being is viciously subordinated to a predetermined
