money, even with college educations and advanced degrees. The
welfare system that seeks to control women, and ultimately to destroy expendable women (black and poor white women, Hispanics, the females of any marginal groups), can count on the continuing
poverty of these women as women; they are never going to do
better because they are women and there are no social means to
enable them to do better, except marriage upward. The poverty of
these millions of women is assured; and so is the state’s continued
access to them; and so too is their continuing sexual humiliation by
state intrusion, the welfare agencies being thus far the major enforcement arm of state policy. Since reproductive containment (at best) has been the goal of welfare, there will be continued state
intrusion into the reproductive lives of poor women—with the endemic racism of the United States putting black women consistently at the highest risk. The intrusion will be under the guise of morality, as it has always been, a morality applied exclusively to
women, a morality that no right-wing senator or congressman
would ever think of using the state to apply to men. It will also be
disguised— by those more secular—as concern for the black fam
ily: controlling the sexual promiscuity of the woman, reinstating
the black man in the master’s bedroom, such as it is on his block.
Under the surface, there w ill be a different truth: the state,
through the welfare system as a whole, wants to control the fertility of the woman and w ill not ever let the black man come in out of the cold. The state regulates the sexual use of non welfare women
for the benefit of men as a class, and it attempts to control the
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
