Please visit MERJ online at joinmerj.org.;xNLx;NOTE 1: Birthing people have exercised their rights to bodily autonomy, including fertility control and abortion, for thousands of years.;xNLx;NOTE 2: Many of the events in the timeline below apply to more than one of the category bands.;xNLx;NOTE 3: The first event in this timeline is from 1455.
This declaration set the stage for centuries of "legal" enslavement, sexual abuse and assault, and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples by European colonizers.
By the time of the arrival of European colonizers, Indigenous birthing people and healers have already been using herbal medicines to control their fertility and assert their bodily autonomy for thousands of years.
Sexual assault against Indigenous women by European colonizers is rampant and "legal," beginning with Christopher Columbus himself and generations of conquerors that came after him.
During the colonial period, the legality of abortion varied from colony to colony and reflected the attitude of the European country which controlled the specific colony.
Slavery represented the absolute denial of reproductive rights and self-determination. This system was at the very foundation of the United States' development, and was in place for nearly 250 years.
Enslaved women rebelled against sexual assault and rape inflicted on them by their owners Enslaved women were expected to maintain the enslaved populations, which led women to rebel against this expectation via contraception and abortions. Infanticide was also committed as a means to protect children from either becoming enslaved or from returning to enslavement.
The first law framing reproduction as population control was passed in 1662 in the Virginia Colony, which overturned the English common law tradition that defined the status of a child—enslaved or fee—as following the status of the father.
In 1692, the Virginia Colony clamped down on the births of racially "mixed" children, outlawing intermarriage, marking all racially indeterminate children "illegitimate," and forcing them to work for many years as bonded labor.
"Christian missionaries had a significant impact on the reproductive lives of Native peoples and communities in the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Connecticut: On May 22, 1821, the state legislature passed a new Crimes and Punishment Act that included a section called “Administering Poison with an Intent to Murder, or Cause Miscarriage.” For the first time in American history, the law criminalized giving a woman something to terminate a pregnancy.
"Throughout much of the 19th century, both before and after the Indian Removal Act of 1830 ... federal officials pursued policies of genocide—the ultimate population-control policy.
"The U.S. military forced [the the majority of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations] into areas west of the Mississippi River, a brutal process that had special dangers for women of reproductive age and therefore for the community as a whole.
The newly-established medical profession, which was open only to men, wanted to get control over the highly profitable business of childbirth, which at that time was dominated by midwives.
James Marion Sims (January 25, 1813 – November 13, 1883) was a pioneering American physician in the field of surgery. His most famous work was the development of a surgical technique for the repair of vesicovaginal fistula, a severe complication of obstructed childbirth. He developed this technique via non-consensual and unanesthetized surgeries on enslaved black women Anarcha Westcott, Lucy, and Betsey, and impoverished Irish women.
"Juneteenth marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. The troops’ arrival came a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The following year marked the first Juneteenth celebration, commemorating a freedom that had been delayed but not denied.
"Following the abolition of slavery, many Black women, particularly in rural Southern communities, continued to provide birth support in communities. They were known as 'Granny Midwives.'
Previous to this declaration, abortion was acceptable up to “quickening” at around 24 weeks, at which time the fetus is theoretically “ensouled.”
Congress passes the Comstock Act, which makes it a crime to distribute via mail or to import information about "obscene materials," including materials about or for contraception and abortion.
The Page Act effectively prohibited the entry of unmarried Asian women, and especially women of Chinese descent, into the US, as a way of "limiting family development."
"The best evidence shows that, in the face of [oppressive] laws and policies—and in the context of urbanization and industrialization—women everywhere were more determined than ever to limit their fertility, however they could.
Under this law, unmarried Chinese women were prevented from immigrating to the United States, along with many wives of Chinese laboring men who could not prove the validity of their marriages. The impacts of the law (and its 1875 predecessor, the Page Act) were dramatic:
Maternal mortality rates were highest in the 20th century between 1900 and 1930.
"By the end of the eighteenth century, all states had criminalized abortion."
Prior to 1907, the US government sterilized persons only for punitive reasons. In 1907, Indiana enacted America’s first compulsory eugenic sterilization (CES) law, with fifteen other states enacting similar laws during the following two decades.
In the United States, Margaret Sanger and Otto Bobsein popularized the phrase "birth control" in 1914.
Citation: "Reproductive Justice: An Introduction," by Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger, p. 33
Nurse Margaret Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic – the first in the United States – in the Brownsville neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York City.
The Immigration Act of 1917, or the Burnett Act, was a United States Act that aimed to restrict immigration by imposing literacy tests on immigrants, creating new categories of inadmissible persons, and barring immigration from the Asia–Pacific region. This Act effectively stopped immigration to the US from India for decades.
This act established the first federally funded social welfare program in the United States. "White feminist activists fervently supported this legislation (while the American Medical Association opposed it as 'socialistic') because it provided services such as infant and maternity care for the poor and pre- and post-partum education for pregnant women.
The US Supreme Court ruled that a Virginia statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the "unfit," including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
"Experts at the time estimated that between 25 and 40 percent of all pregnancies were terminated by abortion during the Depression.
"Long before the government decriminalized female contraceptives, it provided condoms to soldiers during World War I and also listed condoms as 'approved prophylactics' in the 1930s, to protect uniformed men against 'venereal diseases.'"
"Nationwide, the number of public clinics dispensing contraceptives, pregnancy and maternity care jumped from 145 in 1932 to 357 in 1937."
In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis. It was originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” (now referred to as the “USPHS Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee”).
The Federal Housing Administration was established in 1934 and introduced redlining, a practice which upholds systemic racism through refusing mortgages to individuals based on race and ethnicity.
By the mid 1930s, 21 states have passed eugenics laws, many of which have stipulations allowing forced sterilization.
"In San Francisco, schoolteacher Jane Kwong Le took Chinese women to the Planned Parenthood clinic, she said, so that they could get birth control before they got pregnant." —Text quoted from "Reproductive Justice: An Introduction," by Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger, p. 33
In 1937, Puerto Rico enacted Law 116, the last eugenics sterilization law passed under United States territorial jurisdiction.
The Aid to Dependent Children program "excluded children of 'immoral' unmarried mothers and most women of color.
Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. 14 years after her exit as its president, ABCL's successor organization became Planned Parenthood in 1942.
Skinner v. Oklahoma is a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that held that laws permitting the compulsory sterilization of criminals are unconstitutional as it violates a person's rights given under the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, specifically the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause.
The legalization of induced abortion beginning in the 1960s contributed to an 89% decline in deaths from septic illegal abortions during 1950-1973.
From 1950-58, Dr. Clarence Gamble conducts population control experiments in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico by assisting the island-wide campaign to promote "la operación."
"Between the 1940s and Roe v. Wade in 1973, unmarried white women who had babies were often institutionalized in 'maternity homes' or otherwise hidden away by their families, and forced to give up their babies for adoption to 'properly married' white, middle-class people.
The first oral contraceptive, Enovid, is tested in Puerto Rico.
"One piece of reproductive technology that seemed to support sexual liberation for all women was the birth control pill, first marketed in 1960, after extensive testing, largely in programs, such as the one in Puerto Rico, that used women of color as guinea pigs, including massive sterilization campaigns.
In 1961, a White doctor performed a “Mississippi Appendectomy” on Fannie Lou Hamer during her surgery for removal of a uterine tumor.
By 1965, 35% of Puerto Rican women have been sterilized.
In this landmark case, the Supreme Court found that the right of married couples to use contraception is protected by the fundamental right of privacy found in the 14th Amendment and the other guarantees in the Bill of Rights.
The National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded, advocating for reproductive rights and equality for women, including Black women. (BWPC)
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