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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - III. Population and Migration - 7. Population - 6. The Case for Controlling the Negro Birth Rate
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176 An American Dilemma
so ignorant and so poor that they are not desirable parents and cannot offer
their children a reasonably good home. The chances of their children dying
at any early age are much greater than those of other children. No social
policy, however radically framed, would be able to lift the standards of these
people immediately. The most direct way of meeting the problem, not tak-
ing account of the value premises in the American Creed, would be to
sterilize them. The fact that most whites would want to decrease the Negro
population—particularly the lower class Negroes—would strengthen the
argument for sterilization of destitute Negroes.
We find, however, that such proposals, if they are made at all, are
almost as repugnant to the average white American in the South and the
North as to the Negro. In general he is not inclined to consider steriliza-
tion as a means of birth control except to prevent the reproduction of the
feeble-minded, the insane, and the severely malformed when a hereditary
causation can be shown.®^ Outside of those rare cases he is against steriliza-
tion even if entirely voluntary.
For this he gives not only the reason that in many regions of the South
the political and judicial system is such that, for Negroes and perhaps other
poor people, a system of ^Voluntary” sterilization might in practice turn
out to be compulsory. His resistance goes deeper. He reacts against the
idea that any individual, for reasons which have no biological but only
social causes, should undergo an unnatural restriction of his procreative
possibilities. Outside the narrow field of negative eugenics, sterilization is,
therefore, excluded as a means of controlling fertility. Except for individual
cases in which life or health is threatened by child-bearing, the average
American takes a similar attitude toward induced abortion. In his opinion,
life should not be extinguished. Abortion, further, is not entirely free from
health risks.®
The type of birth control which we shall have to discuss as a means of
population policy is thus for all practical purposes restricted to contracep-
tion. As we have already seen, the whites’ desire to decrease the Negro
population becomes, even in regard to birth control, entirely overshadowed
by quite other valuations centered on the health and happiness of the
individual parents and children, which are all backed by the American
Creed and shared by the Negroes. The full possibilities of these latter
valuations in permitting a birth control policy in America have not yet been
realized. Under their sanction birth control facilities could be extended
relatively more to Negroes than to whites, since Negroes are more con-
centrated in the lower income and education classes and since they now know
less about modern techniques of birth control. On this score there would
probably be no conflict of policy between Negroes and whites.
•The prevalence of this political attitude does not prevent individuals from resorting
to abortion when they want to interrupt undesired pregnancies.
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