kula:

catswithtentacles:

kula: the notion that u shouldn’t reproduce if you cannot afford it is stage 2 western eugenics Why would you reproduce if you can’t afford it though?

Because the basic evolutionary instinct that is human sexual reproduction is not beholden to made up sheets of paper we call “money.” But, on a less shady note, wanting children but choosing not to have them based on financial constraints is a realistic decision that many people undertake partly because we live under capitalism and have been socially trained to stigmatize recipients of welfare and they are not wrong for doing so, but the stigma attached to those who choose to despite their financial prospects finds its roots in the negative eugenics movement. Dr. Molly Ladd-Taylor writes that the state-sanctioned encouragement to not reproduce based on being poor is tied to programs like this:

Unlike an earlier generation of Social Darwinists who took a “laissez-faire” approach and viewed disease as a natural way to weed out the unfit, eugenicists in the twentieth century emphasized the importance of state action. They worried that reform efforts to improve the environment and establish child health and welfare programs mostly benefited the unfit and would therefore weaken the race, and so they looked to government to prevent the reproduction of the so-called unfit through marriage restrictions, sexual segregation, and sterilization laws.



Women with disabilities and poor women of colour have been particularly vulnerable to reproductive coercion. Stereotyped as drug-addicted, alcoholic, incompetent, or abusive, they are often blamed for the poverty and supposed defects of their children. Many have their reproductive rights denied and their children taken away. In Canada, more Indigenous children are in foster care today than attended residential schools at their height. In the U.S., the War on Drugs and punitive welfare-to-work programs led to a dramatic increase in the prison population and an astonishingly high rate of foster care. In 2013, media reports of female inmates illegally sterilized in California prisons and a government inquiry into the forced sterilization of women with disabilities in Australia brought public attention to the awful durability of eugenics.

Jacayln Ambler writes,

Also common during this time was a belief in the theory of degeneracy, which posited that a wide variety of mental and neurological issues were the result of a single hereditary condition affecting the central nervous system. From here, it was a short leap to conclude that poverty, criminality, addictions, and other undesirable behaviours were also symptomatic of a type of genetically based mental disorder, which came to be called “feeble-mindedness” (Caulfield 1996, 69). The eugenics movement pointed to two new, intimately connected sources of genetic “contamination” to account for the perceived increase in social ills. One was a difference in birth rates – specifically, a declining birth rate amongst “desirable” middle and upper class citizens and a higher birth rate amongst the “undesirable” poor, disabled, and members of other marginalized groups (Caulfield 1996, 69) - and the other was immigration.

You can also read Dr. Alexandra Stern’s summary of how the rhetoric and programs behind “population control” initiatives have been wedded to the eugenic ideology. Further resources can be found at the Eugenics Archive of America.