birth to the teeming masses are not altogether necessary anymore.
There is lots of liberal hope and goodwill. The Right has reason to
be pleased too, since society operates largely according to its conception of value: poor, black, Hispanic, and immigrant populations would inevitably be the targets of state-run population-control programs; the teeming masses, so messy, so poor, so dark, would disappear, or significantly diminish in numbers, taking with them the poverty for which their color seems responsible. Get rid of those
dirty beggars in India. Get rid of the bastards those black women
on welfare keep producing. Get rid of the Jews too, the old and
sick, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the political dissidents—as the
Nazis did, often in the name of creating a better-quality population. But the Nazis did not just kill to get rid of the population garbage. They had a program of breeding. Himmler developed a
plan for a Women’s Academy of Wisdom and Culture: it would
give a degree called “Exalted Woman. ” Birth control advertising
was forbidden; birth control clinics were shut down; abortions
were forbidden and the Nazis were fierce enforcers of antiabortion
laws; all so that Aryan women would breed. In 1934, the Nazis
established the Mother Service Department. Its purpose was to educate women over eighteen to fulfill the duties of womanhood Nazi-style. “The program of our Nationalist Socialist woman’s
movement contains really only one single point, ” said Hitler in
1934. “This point is the child that must come into being and that
must thrive. ” 2 Fiancees of S . S. men had to take the training offered by the Mother Service Department. Pure German women were encouraged to bear the children of S . S. men and were sup-
ported by the Nazi state. Himmler established homes for these
women. No abortion, no birth control, no careers other than motherhood for the racially pure; imprisonment, rape, sometimes sterilization, and death for the others. The racially privileged woman is not free; the conditions of her survival are predetermined; she may
get rewards for meeting them but outside of them she has no
chance. While the racially inferior women are being used one way,
the racially superior women are being used in what appears to be
an opposite way: but it is not. These are two sides of the same
coin. The two sides travel together, materially inseparable and yet
unalterably divided. Neither side, in this case, has a life outside
totalitarian womanhood. In such a society, the racially privileged
woman has the best deal; but she is not free. Freedom is something
different from the best deal—even for women.
State-run population programs always have the racist tinge and
are sometimes explicitly and murderously racist. Population-con-
trol programs run by any state or state-controlled agency or beholden to any male interest or clique are very different from the ideology and practice of reproductive freedom. Reproductive freedom has as its basic premise the notion that every individual woman must control her own reproductive destiny. She has a right
to be protected from state intrusion and from male intrusion: she
has a right to determine her own reproductive life. Abortion on
demand, for instance, is at the will of the pregnant woman; sterilization of poor women is usually at the will of the male doctor who represents his race and class and is often paid by the state or acts
in accordance with the interests of the state. Sterilization abuse in
the United States has been practiced primarily on very poor black
and Hispanic women. Contraceptives are tested on the women in
Puerto Rico, which has the virtue of being a U . S. colony as well as
having a brown-skinned population. Contraceptive drugs known to
be highly toxic are tested systematically on women in the Third
World with that astonishingly familiar misogynist justification—
“They want it. ” The evidence of this collective will is that the
