Policing the Womb | Michele Goodwin

Low-fertility alarmism is rampant in many countries. Who is and isn't encouraged to reproduce has always been a question of power in the US. Legal scholar Michele Goodwin traces a disturbing lineage from the forced breeding of enslaved women and the sterilization of primarily poor white women deemed genetically unfit to the very different reproductive choices available to women on the basis of race and class. She reveals how reproductive rights in the Roe era came to focus on abortion rights and failed to address broader reproductive injustices, especially the use of state power to police the wombs of Black and brown women. Highlights include: How Michele's visits to her relatives in the Deep South of the US in the 1970s, and seeing their lack of basic necessities like clean water or indoor plumbing, heightened her desire to address social injustice; How US pronatalism up until the Civil War was characterized by promoting reproduction of the enslaved girls and women for the sake of increasing the value of property; How the practice of 'hypodescent', or the one drop rule, in the US of determining blackness, allowed for the systematic and ongoing rape of Black women, while guaranteeing all their children remain property as slaves; How following the US Civil War, a fear of newly freed African Americans outnumbering the white population led to the implementation of coercive pronatalist policies pushing reproduction among white women; Why, with restrictive Jim Crow laws that maintained the low status of African Americans as the servant class, early 20th century eugenics, as marked by forced sterilization laws in the majority of US states, was primarily directed at poor white people deemed genetically unfit; How both Jim Crow laws and eugenics practices in the US became the primary models for Nazi Germany; How Michele's travels to India revealed the severe limitations on reproductive freedom of young women, with many resorting to becoming child brides, prostitutes, or gestational surrogates for survival; How Black women's pregnancies during the half century of Roe V. Wade abortion legality were marked by policing of low-birth weight babies and an assumption of drug use; whereas the mostly white IVF pregnancies and their offspring's low-birth weights were given broad cultural support; How the reproductive rights movement in the time of Roe became limited to abortion rights, driven primarily by the needs of white women, while ignoring larger issues plaguing Black women, such as lack of availability of sex education, contraception, and cancer screening. See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript: https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/michele-goodwin OVERSHOOT | Shrink Toward Abundance OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings. Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance. Subscribe to our newsletter here: https://www.populationbalance.org/subscribe Support our work with a one-time or monthly donation: https://www.populationbalance.org/donate Learn more at https://www.populationbalance.org Copyright 2016-2026 Population Balance