Let's Talk About Sex (and Politics)

Michelle Wong

Media 384

Blog Post #4

Let’s Talk About Sex (and Politics)

            It is a complex idea for me to accept that there’s a catch-22 on our decisions we make for our own bodies. First, the government tells women, you cannot get an abortion, even if law abides, we’ll make sure that you’ll be stopped one way or another. Then at one point they tell us, you cannot push living human beings out of you because we don’t want you to. So, on a side of the coin, we don’t have the right of abortion, and on the flip side, we don’t have the right of reproduction. Then the question becomes, what rights do I have as a woman? 

            

            Amidst of the war for abortion freedoms, a part of history showed the injustices for reproduction caused a mass of outcry as well. In the "glory" of eugenics, many women were pushed onto surgery tables for involuntary sterilization. In the 1930’s southern states actually funded birth control clinics, for the sake of limiting the growing population of minorities. The government decided that some people were just economically unfit and mentally incapable of having children, because their “bad genes” would be passed on to the off springs and become burdens of society. For many women, “the right to bear children and to raise them out of poverty is equally important.”(Nelson 2) But for the sake of eugenics, women signed forms, that they weren’t even able to read, to waive away their reproductive freedom.