If a Woman Wants to Have Children, It's Her Business

            Having kids initiated me into a new group: mom friends. It’s a sprawling network, locally I have three friends who all went through the crucible of having our first kids together, and we text almost every day. On Facebook, I belong to an academic mom group 12,000 strong. Other mom friends would include my own mother, my mother-in-law, my sisters-in-law, my aunt, my godmother, my high school best friend, my friends who have older children (this group is especially comforting). I wouldn’t know how to parent without these women, and I’m tremendously grateful.

There are also the moms I meet through the kids’ schools. Alex’s elementary school has been a kind and welcoming place. Our daughter’s preschool, new to the Upstate, is explicitly devoted to creating community and we love it. Through the preschool I met a new mom friend this summer, and we decided to join a book club at our local independent bookstore, M. Judson.

M. Judson is an important space in downtown Greenville, not just because it keeps the flame of independent bookselling alive (if you don’t live locally, you can support them by buying your books here). It is also an important space for women. It is woman-owned, and named for a local feminist Mary Camilla Judson, who ran what became the Furman Women’s College. The Female College, as it was ungracefully named, was one of the few places for women to receive a post-secondary education in the Upstate in the nineteenth century (read more about her here). She had radical ideas that chaffed against the Baptist establishment, promoting things like exercise and public speaking for women. She also thought that women could engage in rational arguments: “Every Friday night during the term, all students and faculty met for discussion of literature and current events interspersed with music and debates. The debates showed, the Lady Principal said… that ‘a girl can see a point and hit it, too.’ Subjects like ‘Resolved: Women should be as well educated as men’ were popular.”

M. Judson’s book clubs continue, I think, in this spirt. We joined the Well Read Black Girls summer discussion (open to all, part of a national project). Our first novel was Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand, a fictionalized account of the Relf sisters, who at ages 12 and 14 were sterilized under a federal program that targeted girls and women deemed “unfit” to be mothers (the U.S. has a long history of these programs). Set in 1973 in Montgomery, Alabama, the main character Civil struggles with her own decision to obtain an illegal abortion the year before she meets the girls. I highly recommend the book. It’s a hard read, lots of tears (especially reading it post Roe) but it humanizes the context and history of Black women’s experiences with institutionalized medicine and government control.

The Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuit ended the federal funding for the programs in 1974. But sterilizations were pushed unofficially. The New York Times printed this story in 1973, about the only OB-GYN in Aiken, S.C. that would deliver babies to women on Medicaid. He would do so only if, after having three children, the women agreed to be sterilized. Despite the media attention, no official investigation was underway, but the community was outraged. The Times interviewed the director of the local Planned Parenthood:

One person who is highly critical of Dr. Pierce's methods is Mrs. Margaret J. Weston, black registered nurse who is director of the local Planned Parenthood program. Her husband, a surgeon, serves as the program's medical director.

“Forced sterilization? I don't believe in that—no, honey. I am personally enraged at what happened in Aiken. It's a disgrace and a shame,” she said. She said her clinic had served about 1,200 women, none of whom have been referred for sterilization.

The answer to family planning is educating the public, Mrs. Weston said, not sterilizing. People really don't understand, she said, explaining her reluctance to encourage sterilization.

“If a woman wants 10 children, it's her business,” she said. “But I know she will want to voluntarily limit the size of her family once she understands all the responsibilities involved in raising children and providing for them.”

I imagine the women that were able to attend Mary Judson’s Friday tutorials came from upper class, white families. Our gathering for book club that Tuesday June evening, in a beautifully appointed room overlooking downtown Greenville, was half Black women, half white, from a diversity of socioeconomic class positions. Some of us were mothers, some of us were not. Our ages spanned decades. It was a unique group, most spaces in the South remain highly segregated. Improving the lives of girls, women and LGBTQ people in the South depends on more gatherings like these, so that we can understand the fight for reproductive justice as a multifaceted one. It is a fight for bodily autonomy, for the right to not be pregnant. But it is also a fight to uplift all parents as equally valued and supported. This fight requires fully facing the violent racist, classist and ableist past that denied women the right to become mothers. As Mrs. Weston said, if a woman wants to have children, it’s her business.

In South Carolina, the lack of government support for women and children is also rooted in this racist and classist past, based on the idea that poor women and women of color shouldn’t be having children in the first place. These punishing attitudes defund our schools, block Medicaid expansion, and force women back to work almost immediately after giving birth. While government-funded sterilization programs have ended, the attitudes that motivated them persist. I hope our network of mothers can coalesce for political action, like this one in Texas:

Mom friends, for the win.