women line up for injections of such drugs. It is frequently not
mentioned that a chicken or other food is payment for taking the
shot, and the women are starving and so are their children. Those
who have seen institutionalized programs of population control as a
humane and sensible solution to some aspects of mass poverty have
been unable to face the problem intrinsic to these programs: the
poor are often also not white, and the enthusiasm of state planners
for population control is often based on this fact. Children of these
women long ago ceased to be altogether desirable; and these
women long ago ceased to be altogether necessary.
The marginality of these masses of women because of race has
obscured how much their expendability has to do with being
women. “Made in South America Where Life Is Cheap” read the
advertisements for the pornographic film
show the torture, maiming, and murder of a woman for the purposes of sexual entertainment: the removing of the woman’s uterus from her slit abdomen was the sexual act to which the man in the
film who was doing the cutting supposedly climaxed. Life is cheap
for both women and men wherever life is cheap, and life is cheap
wherever people are poor. But for women, life is in the uterus; and
the well-being of women—economic, social, sexual—depends on
what the value of the uterus is, how it will be used and by whom,
whether or not it will be protected and why. Whatever her race or
class—however much she is privileged or hated for one or both—a
woman is reducible to her uterus. This is the essence of her political condition as a woman. If she is childless, she is not worth much to anyone; if her children are less than desirable, she is less than
necessary. On a global scale, racist population programs already
exist that provide the means and the ideological justifications for
making masses of women extinct because their children are not
wanted. The United States, a young, virile imperialist power compared to its European precursors, has pioneered this kind of reproductive imperialism. The United States was the perfect nation to do so, since the programs depend so much on science and tech
nology (the nation’s pride) and also on a most distinctive recognition of precisely how expendable women are as women, simply because they are women. Obsessed with sex as a nation, the
United States knows the strategic importance of the uterus, abroad
and at home.
Inside the United States, gynocidal polices are increasingly discernible. The old, the poor, the hungry, the drugged, the mentally ill, the prostituted, those institutionalized in wretchedly inhumane
nursing homes and mental hospitals, are overwhelmingly women.
In a sense, the United States is in the forefront of developing a
postindustrial, post-Nazi social policy based on the expendability
of any group in which women predominate and are not valued for
reproduction (or potential reproduction in the case of children).
Public policy in the United States increasingly promises to protect
middle-class or rich white women owned in marriage who reproduce and to punish all other women. The Family Protection Act— a labyrinthian piece of federal legislation designed to give
police-state protection to the male-headed, male-dominated, fe-
male-submissive fam ily— and the Human Life Amendment, which
would give a fertilized egg legal rights adult women are still without, would be the most significant and effective bludgeoning instruments of this public policy if passed. Along with already actual cutbacks in Social Security, Medicaid, and food programs, these
