(Image source: Pandia Health)

Conversations about reproductive rights are often shaped by unexamined moral assumptions: the assumption that we all share an idea of what good and healthy families look like, and that we all see access to contraception as a means to achieve the ideal family. As it turns out, however, the image of a model family unit (one with 2.5 children, 2 parents, no live-in extended family, a cat and/or dog, and a picket fence) is tied tightly to both race and class; it was, if not manufactured, carefully developed and promoted by a collection of Christian clergy in the middle of the 20^th century, with the idea of making birth control respectable, so as to exalt and support upwardly mobile white families.

Today, the reproductive justice movement is working to broaden people’s ideas about what constitutes a “legitimate” family. Because the reproductive justice movement also advocates for the right to raise children in healthy conditions, members work towards goals like universal healthcare, gun-free streets, lead-free water, and for some, abolition of the police. These issues, reproductive justice activists argue, are as necessary to improving reproductive health as access to contraception and birth control.

The reproductive justice movement’s goals can feel broad and, particularly in the wake of the Dobbs decision, I have noticed that that when I am invited to speak on religion and reproductive rights, many white feminists insist we must unite to protect access to abortion and contraception, and that working on anything else will dilute our efforts when we need to batten down our hatches and focus on what really matters. In these settings, where white women work to protect or reclaim rights they took for granted and are now losing, I have seen notable pushback when I present the broader agenda of a reproductive justice movement. To my white audiences, the needs of the reproductive justice movement seem diffuse: How, they ask, is lead-free drinking water or gun-free streets tied to the need for abortion access? Can’t we, shouldn’t we, keep our focus narrow and work on the goals that we all share?

There are many reasons why, for communities of color, the idea that we should all focus on the “universal” goals articulated by white feminists does not sit well. Many of these reasons are overt and stark: white doctors and civic leaders have, for instance, forced sterilization on communities of color, and stripped them of their children. While the effects of these traumas continue to reverberate throughout the communities that experienced them, the white feminists in my audiences often seem to relegate these abuses to the past; indeed, their obvious cruelty makes them seem impossible to imagine occurring today.

What makes this so complex, however, is that the rights that feel newly under attack are rights that center on the ability not to have a child. The means to access contraception and abortion are, indeed, central to the ability of women and other people with the capacity for pregnancy to gain education and to succeed in their professional lives. But contraception, and in its failure, abortion, are also central to the ability to have and create the “ideal” American family.

That ideal American family is based on a moral argument about what makes people good parents, and what makes families good families. Clergy, lay leaders, and even doctors used that moral argument to make birth control acceptable, and respectable, and they rooted that argument in the values of a white, upwardly mobile society. The same society that upheld these ideals made it hard for Black families, and other people of color, to achieve those ideals and punished them harshly when they could not meet these almost impossible expectations.

What did this look like? The ideal American nuclear family was, in part, the product of a Protestant movement called “responsible parenthood,” dreamed up to offer a theological roadmap for how to use relatively new birth control technologies in the middle of the twentieth century. The key elements of this theology were most clearly articulated in the Statement on Responsible Parenthood, adopted by the National Council of Churches’ (NCC) General Board in 1961. The NCC was (and is) a racially diverse organization, whose member congregations included historically Black denominations, but the organizational leadership in the middle of the 20^th century was overwhelmingly white and male.

For the NCC leaders, advances in medical science had dramatically decreased infant and child mortality, which meant the population was rising in ways that might be concerning. The world population, they worried, might outstrip its food supply. According to these leaders, medical science offered a solution to this problem: couples could control their fertility. (In 1961, this meant using the newly FDA-approved birth control pill and the fitted diaphragm, which had been around for a couple of decades.)

Given these two realities—rising population and scientifically developed contraception— the NCC argued that (1) Christians should see parenthood as a divinely ordained purpose of marriage; (2) mutual love and companionship are also ordained parts of marriage, which include sexual relations, regardless of procreation; and, (3) couples might have a vocation to fill in the world that they would be better able to fulfill if they could plan the number and timing of the children in their families.

These points gave a formal acknowledgement that marital, non-procreative sex had value, and moreover, that potentially constant reproduction was not the default reality of married life. While the operating assumption was that people would and should still have children, the NCC believed Protestant spouses could exert their moral agency about how many children they could raise in a way that would be financially sustainable and spiritually and emotionally nourishing for all concerned.

In deciding when and how many children to have, married Protestant couples needed to consider the following: 1) the right of the child to be wanted, loved, cared for, educated, and “trained in the discipline and instruction of the Lord;” 2) the prospect of health for the future child “if medical and eugenic evidence seemed negatively conclusive,” which is to say, if doctors suspected a future child would have a disability of some sort; 3) the health of the “mother-wife” and the need to safeguard it by spacing children; and, 4) the social situation, “when rapid population growth places dangerous pressures on the means of livelihood and endangers social order.” As troubling as these viewpoints might seem to the modern reader, especially from the standpoint of disability rights and contemporary women’s rights, to the largely white, able-bodied, male leaders of the NCC, these principles served as universal values that represented progress—the ability to minimize suffering from illness, injury, or financial strain, and the capacity to care more fully for the planet.

If one were to apply all of these principles (in the eyes of NCC theologians), it would produce the kind of family most recognizable on television: a Leave It to Beaver or Donna Reed Show family of 4, or maybe 5, in which Dad’s white collar job could support the nuclear family, while Mom stayed home as the primary nurturer. In the middle of the twentieth century, a wide array of social policies (such as the GI Bill) made this family structure increasingly possible for white families, without providing equal help to families of color. Meanwhile, another set of social policies (such as redlining) and social realities (such as race-based policing) made achieving this family structure increasingly difficult for people of color.

(Image of a “historical nuclear family” in The Atlantic. Source: H. Armstrong Roberts for Getty)

By holding up the (white) nuclear family as an ideal model, the NCC undermined other family structures and networks of care that supported those for whom this family structure was out of reach. In all likelihood, the mid-twentieth century Protestant clergy who advocated for responsible parenthood were actively trying to avoid the linkages of birth control and eugenics that had plagued pro-birth control activism in earlier eras. But even so, their plan had unconsidered racist implications. And really, this is the key issue: even with the best of intentions, their ideas about what constitutes good, Christian families, so deeply predicated on white middle-class culture, had the potential for horrible consequences.

As birth control became more accepted throughout the country, the language of responsible parenthood seeped out past Protestant clergy and began to inform policy makers, elected officials, and the broader American public. As that happened, politicians and others promoted contraception in ways that were implicitly racist.

As one example of many, on January 14, 1993, Governor William Donald Schaefer of Maryland gave his annual State of the State address. He described how Maryland could “humanely reduce the number of children being born.” He did this in a discussion of “the system,” by which he meant the Juvenile Justice System, the Welfare System, and the Foster Care System—all of the “systems” set up to avoid what he described as “problems we can prevent.” Governor Schaefer said:

“Today I want to start the debate on how we can humanely reduce the number of children to be born. To parents who cannot provide for them; to parents who will not provide for them. And I am worried about parents who won’t accept responsibility for their children and who expect the state to be the provider. I have been in public office for 30 years and in that time I have seen the welfare roles continue to grow. I personally have seen children having children. Those children being treated as rag dolls. I have seen these same children with serious health problems, lack of esteem, become drop-outs, enter the juvenile system, and finally graduate to Bishop Robinson’s prison system. One reason is we haven’t done enough to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Another reason is we want to make parents more responsible for the children they have.”

Schaefer proposed that, in order to receive Welfare benefits, women who had children outside of marriage should be required to use Norplant, a contraceptive comprised of five capsules inserted under the skin, usually in the upper arm, that remained effective for five years, or until they were removed. Governor Schaefer’s call to require women on welfare to use Norplant raised concerns about eugenic motives. In fact, his continued association of irresponsible behavior with welfare recipients—specifically, mothers on welfare—raised flags. The trope of the “welfare queen” has long been associated with the image of a Black woman who, rather than contributing to society in a “productive” way by taking part in our capitalist economy, purposely becomes pregnant in order to rack up government pay checks. This woman supposedly gains wealth in a way that directly goes against the imagined American dream of picking oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and instead sucks up the resources created by other consenting capitalist subjects. While Schaefer did not explicitly mention race when discussing required contraception, he claimed later in the speech that his ideas came from looking at “Afro Americans,” thus making his call to reduce “unwanted pregnancies” inherently racialized.

Schaefer was not making a religious speech. He did not mention God or frame the values that he put forward as “Christian” or otherwise “religious.” However, his language directly echoed the language of “responsible parenthood” that Protestant clergy made mainstream a generation earlier. One piece of their language, however, had disappeared as people promoted responsible parenthood in public and stripped the concept of its overt Protestant rhetoric. For the Protestant theologians who were the architects of responsible parenthood, a person’s behavior was only moral if it was freely chosen. This meant that people needed to come to responsible parenthood as the result of thoughtful prayer. It could not be commanded by a church or mandated by the state. In fact, people like the Reverend Richard Fagley, one of the primary proponents of responsible parenthood, condemned state-sponsored family limitation because it prevented people from making their own decisions about reproduction, thereby closing off a path in which people could morally grow. While this did not prevent responsible parenthood from being deeply and dangerously mired in racial standards, it did guard against direct eugenic action by the state.

When the Protestant language of responsible parenthood moved into the political sphere, the moral nature of the responsible action no longer mattered. It no longer mattered that a person chose contraception based on her own moral agency because the spiritual dimension was not part of the equation. All that mattered was that she acted responsibly according to the standards set by people in positions of authority. The space through which an individual might bring her own hopes, dreams, community values, and senses of whether she and her community could care for a child, were squeezed out of the equation by the paternalism that held up a particular notion of a middle-class white society.

All of this happened, at least in part, because a collection of white male clergy, men who mostly supported the civil rights movement, wanted to make birth control more acceptable, by making it more respectable. And so, they painted a vision of how birth control could better the family, in line with their culturally and economically specific contexts. While they likely understood that social factors made that kind of family ideal harder for Black Americans to achieve, they probably did not understand that they were devaluing other equally or healthier forms of families, and other equally valid networks of care. Within a generation, the language of responsible parenthood that they put forth became so normalized that it was stripped of its moral context, a context that demanded free will; it served to restrict, rather than to expand, reproductive options.

The Schaefer example makes two things evident: (1) white, Protestant, middle-class values are embedded in the way we talk about contraception and family planning; and (2) even well-intentioned norms about family size can take a nasty turn when race, class, and intersectional values are ignored.

More than anything, the Schaefer example suggests that in today’s moment of reproductive crisis, we need to listen to each other and question where our narratives come from, and whose voices are silenced. If we only tell the stories of people who need abortions because of rape or incest or medical tragedy, do we shut out the college student who got pregnant when a condom broke, or when they drunkenly forgot to use one? If we protect the right of women to leave a state to get an abortion, do we neglect the women who cannot afford to go? If we make our core focus only the right to have and access contraception, do we forget to support the social services that help people feed and care for children? If we focus solely on the right not to have a child, because, in this post-Dobbs moment, we are afraid of the criminalization of abortion and of miscarriage, of the slippery slope that will take away birth control, do we forget to help women have and raise the children that they do want?

Samira K. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press) and The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging (Beacon Press).