Losing Faith in the Pill
By Eavan Guirl
In the final chapter of my thesis analyzing the experiences of early birth control pill users in the United States and Puerto Rico, I planned to focus on souring public opinion of the drug in the latter 1960s due to possible evidence of negative side effects. However, I discovered this shift coincided with increasing perceptions of “black genocide.” In this period, population control ideology reenters the birth control conversation as many black Americans take notice of family planning initiatives targeting their neighborhoods. Therefore, my third chapter shifted to focus on the eventual “lack of faith” in the pill following the period of positive public opinion in the early 1960s in the United States.
While distrust of the pill mounted in the professional and public spheres, one demographic expressed suspicions the strongest. The pill was not designed solely to liberate upper and middle-class educated white women. It was taken to be tested in Puerto Rico in order to “clean up” the population problem on the island territory. Those intentions were not forgotten when the pill came to the United States. Still, population control rested at the heart of the pill. Many continued to view it as a solution to poverty and strife throughout the globe, including inside the United States. If population control was the goal, wealthy white women were not the target. As discussed in the previous chapter clinics began popping up in poorer U.S. areas throughout the 1960s. There, wealthy and educated white women were not the primary patients. Black Americans saw the pill as a tool being used to quell the birth rate of black Americans specifically.
“The Negro Response to Birth Control,” an article by Hannah Lees published in The Reporter in 1966, chronicled the debates among black Americans regarding the pill to date. The article begins with a question posed to a black congregation of a Pennsylvania church, “Can we afford birth control as a minority group in the United States?”[1] Nearly all of the responsible and educated members of the group would respond affirmatively.[2] Though certainly many black Americans saw the good of the pill, many viewed it as a “concealed form of genocide.”[3] A black social worker, Uvelia Bowen, spoke to Lees, “The highest birth rate, the most unwed mothers are in the poverty areas which are largely Negro. And they’re the target, aren’t they? Negroes don’t want children they can’t take care of, but we are afraid to trust you when your offered help has so often turned out to be exploitation.”[4] Though black Americans could use the pill as a family planning tool, it could also be utilized as a tool against black populations.
Many black Americans were hesitant. Cecil Moore, President of Philadelphia’s NAACP, was quoted concerning a potential family planning education program, “respite with everything to help Negroes commit race suicide.”[5] Because black Americans had recently found strength in numbers and voting power, family planning programs served as a potential counter to black leaders’ hard work. Lees notes that while sentiments similar to Moore’s do not stand alone in the black community, many oppose such notions, “The number of Negroes on the national and local boards of Planned Parenthood is fast multiplying. Though this is partly because Planned Parenthood has learned to seek them out, their ready acceptance is significant.”[6] For the black community, the debate surrounding family planning functioned as a crossroads between one’s personal needs and the needs of the minority group as a whole. Some, like Moore, saw a greater need to protect the whole. Yet, very many black women continued to seek family planning assistance out of personal necessity, as many white women did too.
For those focused on population control, personal choice rested on the back burner. To the many who subscribed to this way of thinking, these poor black women needed to control the number of children they gave birth to. “Because the Negro population is increasing at a rate of 2.4 percent a year as opposed to 1.7 percent for the white population and because its illegitimacy rate is so much greater, there is a widespread conviction that Negroes want more children than whites, or are simply more irresponsible about parenthood,” according to Lees.[7] However, “…a 1960 study on the growth of American families found that most non-white wives wanted fewer children than white wives (2.9 children compared to 3.3).”[8] If lowering the birth rate of non-whites in the United States is a concern, birth control is an easy answer. Non-white women want fewer children, and population controllers want them to have fewer children. As a result, family planning programs began to crop up in poor, non-white neighborhoods across the United States in the 1960s.
[1] Hannah Lees, “Negro Response to Birth Control,” Reporter, May, 1966, https-//search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rgr&AN=523529480&site=ehost-live&scope=site..pdf , 46.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid, 47.
[7] Ibid, 47-48.
[8] Ibid, 48.