The Body and the Bloodline

This harm leaves the target alive on purpose: it controls not whether a person dies but whether they may reproduce, and whether they may keep the children they already have.

At the interpersonal scale it is called reproductive coercion, with its own validated research literature. A partner sabotages contraception, hides or destroys birth-control pills, refuses to withdraw or use protection after agreeing to, or pressures a pregnancy to term or to termination against the other person’s will — all of it a means of binding the target by making exit materially harder, a child being among the most effective anchors a controller can install.¹ It is the same logic as this book’s financial-coercion chapter, applied to the reproductive system rather than the bank account: manufacture a dependency the target cannot walk away from. The state version is not a metaphor or an escalation of degree. It is the identical operation, run with a law instead of a lie.

The clearest documented instance in an English-speaking country is a Supreme Court decision that has never been overturned. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the Court upheld, by eight to one, the compulsory sterilization of Carrie Buck, a young woman committed to a Virginia institution and declared “feebleminded” alongside her mother and infant daughter. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, concluded that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”² The ruling licensed what became more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations across the United States under eugenic laws. California alone accounted for roughly twenty thousand of them, about a third of the national total, and did not stop performing them in its institutions until the second half of the twentieth century. There is even a documented coda inside its own prison system, where nearly one hundred fifty women were sterilized between 2006 and 2010 without lawful consent.³ The deniability was built into its vocabulary from the start: never called control of a bloodline, but public health, the improvement of the race, and later simply a medical decision made on a patient’s behalf.

Nor is it a uniquely American artifact of a less enlightened century. In 1976, during the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi’s government, India ran a mass-sterilization campaign driven by quotas and enforced through cash incentives, withheld public services, and outright coercion, associated most closely with her son Sanjay Gandhi. More than six million men were sterilized in that single year, many of them poor, many with no meaningful capacity to refuse a procedure tied to their access to housing, land, or medical care.⁴ More recent reporting has documented coercive birth suppression aimed at the Uyghur population of Xinjiang — mandatory contraception, sterilization, and pregnancy checks imposed on an ethnic minority. This book holds that material at the reported-and-contested tier the evidence currently supports, distinct from the settled court and government records anchoring the older cases, rather than letting the documented weight of Buck v. Bell silently transfer to it.⁵

The mirror image of preventing a birth is seizing the child once it is born, and here the documented record includes a conviction of a head of state. Under Argentina’s 1976–1983 military dictatorship, women detained as subversives were kept alive through their pregnancies in clandestine detention centers, delivered, and then murdered, their infants handed to military and police families under fabricated identities — a practice known in Argentina as apropiación, appropriation. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have spent four decades using genealogy and DNA to recover these stolen grandchildren, identifying well over a hundred of an estimated five hundred. In 2012, the former junta leader Jorge Rafael Videla was convicted and sentenced to fifty years for the systematic theft of these babies — not an accusation but a criminal verdict against the man who ran the state.⁶ The severing of the bloodline was the point: a generation of the disappeared was not only killed but erased forward, its children raised inside the families of the people who had killed their parents.

That same operation has an institutional, colonial register that killed no one directly and severed bloodlines all the same. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that the country’s residential-school system — which took roughly a hundred fifty thousand Indigenous children from their families between 1874 and 1996, to be raised apart from their language, kin, and identity — amounted to “cultural genocide.”⁷ Australia’s national inquiry reached a parallel finding about its Stolen Generations, and Spain is still excavating the record of the children taken from politically or socially undesirable mothers under and after the Franco regime.⁸ In every case the removal was administered as welfare — as education, as child protection, as the rescue of a child from an unfit family. The instrument that silences a poisoning by calling it an illness is the same one that launders the theft of a child by calling it adoption.

What unifies the two halves, the prevented birth and the seized child, is one mechanism wearing two faces: an actor asserting sovereignty over a body and a lineage that were never theirs to govern, in a form engineered to be re-read as care.

A bloodline, though, is not a story that can be rewritten. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo answered apropiación with genealogy and DNA, matching stolen grandchildren to the families they were taken from and turning that evidence into the verdict that sent a head of state to prison for fifty years. But the DNA that names a stolen grandchild cannot give back the childhood spent inside the family that took him, and for most of the estimated five hundred, four decades on, no match has ever come.