The Norplant: Eugenics and the State’s Appropriation of Contraceptives
(Image: RCNi)
In a California Superior Court in 1995, Judge Howard Broadman found Darlene Johnson guilty of using a belt to discipline her children. The judge’s ruling was uncommon for a charge of child abuse: Judge Broadman ordered that Darlene Johnson have the Norplant contraceptive implanted in her arm for three years, rendering her unable to have children during that time. The ruling was the first of its kind, exacted by a white judge against a Black mother.
27-year-old Darlene Johnson was a pregnant mother of four at the time. Alongside the Norplant implantation, Judge Broadman sentenced Darlene to a year in jail and three years probation. Darlene agreed to get the Norplant rather than face Judge Broadman’s alternative sentence: time in state prison. Through the sentencing, Broadman specifically held hostage Darlene’s right to motherhood, using it as a means for punishment.
This was the first time that the state ordered a defendant to get a contraceptive as part of a criminal justice ruling. The punishment of forced contraception directly related to Darlene’s perceived crime of being a bad mother, which was inextricably tied to her race. What was really at the heart of Darlene’s case was the state disciplining and enforcement of a “proper motherhood” -- a racist and classist construct -- that Darlene failed to perform.
Despite the judge’s sentence to separate a mother from her children for a year of incarceration, Darlene’s parenting was framed as the defining and only abuse in her children’s lives. There is no law that says that it is illegal to parent while Black, but there also isn’t a law against holding a toy gun while Black; we know that the state criminalizes Black existence. After the fateful 1995 court decision, the Norplant became systematically sentenced in the criminal justice system, targeting poor people, drug-addicted folks, Black people, and otherwise criminalized potential parents.
(Image: New York Times)
The Norplant entered the public domain in 1991 and works on people with uteruses. It is surgically implanted in six locations on the arm and functions by releasing a hormone that prevents pregnancy. In order to become pregnant, one must have the Norplant removed in a procedure by a medical professional, often rendering poor people, people in the Global South, and those without healthcare essentially sterile for the five-year period that the implant works.
Darlene Johnson’s story is not so far in the past. Her experience tells us that fewer than 30 years ago, the United States was openly practicing classist and racist eugenicist policy aimed at limiting population growth for marginalized communities. The historical record shows that the Norplant was used to control bodies with uteruses and to punish women for failing patriarchal standards of motherhood. More, the story of the Norplant ties into larger historical trends in the United States where contraceptives have been weaponized by the state towards eugenicist ends.
In the same year of Darlene’s sentence, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an editorial proposing the Norplant should be used by poor Black women. In this way, and particularly through the practice of courts sentencing people to forced contraception with the device, the Norplant became synonymous with white supremacist appropriation of birth control as a strategy of population control. Forced or involuntary sterilization is a common genocidal strategy, used by the U.S. in Puerto Rico in the mid-20th C, by Nazi Germany against Jews and other marginalized Germans, and by President Fujimori in his campaign against Indigenous Peruvians in the late 20th C. The Norplant is one story of how safe and efficacious birth control can be used against reproductive justice.
For Darlene Johnson, the Norplant violently intervened in her ability to make reproductive health decisions for her own body. Through the frame of state punishment, birth control methods become tools of white supremacy used to punish “deviant” (non-white, queer, disabled, poor, drug-addicted, criminalized) parenting in a larger effort to cultivate a homogenous citizenry along white supremacist values.
The appropriation of the Norplant speaks to how gender, race, class, and other vectors of difference are bound up in definitions of who deserves to be a mother and who doesn’t. When the state has a say in it, marginalized people lose their ability to have children. A reproductive rights lens, which uncritically seeks to increase access to abortion and contraception broadly, dangerously overlooks who is being denied motherhood and the right to parent. So while primarily white women identified the fight in terms of the right to not reproduce, women of color and other marginalized people were fighting for the right to get pregnant and carry those pregnancies safely to term.
(Image: African American Intellectual History Society)