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is independent of the class definition or function, that cannot finally be perceived and justified as incidental to motherhood.

Had anyone thought seriously about how women “cease to be

altogether necessary, ” they might have thought in terms of population control: there are too many people; governments decide to feed all the people, which provides a certain incentive for finding ways

to see that there are less people; this is presented to the people as a

humanistic program to increase the quality of life for a smaller, less

burdensome, less troubled population; the women who were giving

birth to the teeming masses are not altogether necessary anymore.

There is lots of liberal hope and goodwill. The Right has reason to

be pleased too, since society operates largely according to its conception of value: poor, black, Hispanic, and immigrant populations would inevitably be the targets of state-run population-control programs; the teeming masses, so messy, so poor, so dark, would disappear, or significantly diminish in numbers, taking with them the poverty for which their color seems responsible. Get rid of those

dirty beggars in India. Get rid of the bastards those black women

on welfare keep producing. Get rid of the Jews too, the old and

sick, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the political dissidents—as the

Nazis did, often in the name of creating a better-quality population. But the Nazis did not just kill to get rid of the population garbage. They had a program of breeding. Himmler developed a

plan for a Women’s Academy of Wisdom and Culture: it would

give a degree called “Exalted Woman. ” Birth control advertising

was forbidden; birth control clinics were shut down; abortions

were forbidden and the Nazis were fierce enforcers of antiabortion

laws; all so that Aryan women would breed. In 1934, the Nazis

established the Mother Service Department. Its purpose was to educate women over eighteen to fulfill the duties of womanhood Nazi-style. “The program of our Nationalist Socialist woman’s

movement contains really only one single point, ” said Hitler in

1934. “This point is the child that must come into being and that

must thrive. ” 2 Fiancees of S . S. men had to take the training offered by the Mother Service Department. Pure German women were encouraged to bear the children of S . S. men and were sup-

ported by the Nazi state. Himmler established homes for these

women. No abortion, no birth control, no careers other than motherhood for the racially pure; imprisonment, rape, sometimes sterilization, and death for the others. The racially privileged woman is not free; the conditions of her survival are predetermined; she may

get rewards for meeting them but outside of them she has no

chance. While the racially inferior women are being used one way,

the racially superior women are being used in what appears to be

an opposite way: but it is not. These are two sides of the same

coin. The two sides travel together, materially inseparable and yet

unalterably divided. Neither side, in this case, has a life outside

totalitarian womanhood. In such a society, the racially privileged

woman has the best deal; but she is not free. Freedom is something

different from the best deal—even for women.

State-run population programs always have the racist tinge and

are sometimes explicitly and murderously racist. Population-con-

trol programs run by any state or state-controlled agency or beholden to any male interest or clique are very different from the ideology and practice of reproductive freedom. Reproductive freedom has as its basic premise the notion that every individual woman must control her own reproductive destiny. She has a right

to be protected from state intrusion and from male intrusion: she

has a right to determine her own reproductive life. Abortion on

demand, for instance, is at the will of the pregnant woman; sterilization of poor women is usually at the will of the male doctor who represents his race and class and is often paid by the state or acts

in accordance with the interests of the state. Sterilization abuse in

the United States has been practiced primarily on very poor black

and Hispanic women. Contraceptives are tested on the women in

Puerto Rico, which has the virtue of being a U . S. colony as well as

having a brown-skinned population. Contraceptive drugs known to

be highly toxic are tested systematically on women in the Third

World with that astonishingly familiar misogynist justification—