Mothers do all sorts of things to solve this dilemma: I start work by 5am most days. In earlier times, women in search of “a room of one’s own” adopted even more extreme measures in pursuit of peace and quiet. Many opted to give sex the swerve altogether by joining a monastic community: in the Middle Ages there were some 138 nunneries in England.

Over the millennia, doubtless many more women have felt ambivalent about motherhood than is recorded. My grandmother, who worked as a doctor before World War II, told me once that she wasn’t that bothered. But having married, as she put it, “it was rather expected of one”.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Certainly, many of the women who wrote to early birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger found their fertility burdensome. In 1928, Sanger published Motherhood in Bondage, a collection of these letters which describe grinding poverty, struggles with physical health, multiple miscarriages, malnourished children and constant money worries. Frustrated, impoverished and still stubbornly fertile, women pleaded for greater control over their own reproductive biology. One wrote:

“I have been married six years, at the age of seventeen. Am twenty-three now. It seems I can’t keep out of the family way. Have had six children, four living and two dead… every year there is another arrival. I don’t have any enjoyment out of life, staying at home all the while. I will not have anything out of life but worry, children and cares.”

Sanger saw her cause as a progressive one, and reproductive healthcare remains cast in the same light. Recent celebrations in Argentina over the legalisation of abortion, and protests against its restriction in Poland, were led by feminists who understand the constraints imposed on women by our reproductive biology. As Sanger put it: “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”

Thus control over fertility has been a central plank of women’s emancipation, more or less from the moment it became medically feasible to do so. Having fewer children really does afford women greater freedom — and as a culture we really do place a premium on freedom. As Mick Jagger sang in 1965: “I’m free to do what I want, any old time”.

But as I’ve argued before, motherhood cuts across this in ways you can’t really change. The moment you become pregnant you aren’t free to do what you want. You’re not free to drink or eat what you like, and you get progressively less free in your movements as the bump gets bigger. When babies are tiny, you aren’t free to sleep uninterrupted. You can kiss goodbye to the freedom to have a lie-in for a good decade, and to the freedom to spend your money as you please pretty much forever. At best, freedom — in the Rolling Stones’ sense — mixes uncomfortably with kids.

In the same decade as Jagger sang about liberation, women gained an unprecedented new freedom with the legalisation of the contraceptive pill. It was made available in 1961 to married women, then in 1965 extended to all. At that moment, women gained a form of freedom that had previously been the preserve only of (irresponsible) men: the freedom to have sex with limited consequences. To be free, as the Stones put it, “any old time, to get what I want”.

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How the establishment fell for eugenics

By Peter Franklin

Even more profoundly, the Pill delivered the freedom Sanger sought for all women: the freedom to choose motherhood consciously. Fast-forward a few decades, and Sanger’s campaign has been realised. Barring the odd accident, in the West motherhood is largely something women opt into, rather than struggle for ways to opt out of. And it turns out that more women were ambivalent about it than anticipated: birth rates are collapsing across the developed world, leading researchers to warn of a ticking demographic time bomb.

This connection between emancipation and childlessness seems to work both ways. In the West, an emphasis on individual freedom in the women’s movement has depressed fertility among high-flying career women, with egg-freezing rising five-fold in the UK since 2013. In China, meanwhile, the current flowed the other way: the “one-child policy” fostered an explosion of career women.

Thus freedom, feminism and fertility have long been nested issues in progressive politics. But historically, there has also been another, darker aspect to reproductive technology: the vision of using it to improve the human species through selective breeding. In fact, eugenics enjoyed widespread popularity in the early 20th century as a progressive cause, and was discussed by both Margaret Sanger and her English counterpart, Marie Stopes.

For as soon as one can control fertility, the question arises: who gets to do so, and to what end? Stopes argued that reproductive technologies should be used in the interests of improving humanity by eliminating the stupid, the weak, the disabled, those she considered morally deficient and those belonging to racial groups she thought inferior. In the interests of the greater good, all such human specimens should be sterilised:

“When Bills are passed to ensure the sterility of the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased, and to provide for the education of the child-bearing woman so that she spaces her children healthily, our race will rapidly quell the stream of depraved, hopeless and wretched lives which are at present ever increasing in proportion in our midst.”

Such casually dehumanising language rightly appals us today, and the foundation started by Marie Stopes recently changed its name to MSI Choices to downplay the association with a eugenics advocate. It was an understandable effort to untangle the acquisition of women’s freedom afforded by reproductive technology from the horrifying potential of such advances. And yet the genie is out of the bottle. Stopes’ nightmare vision of eugenics as public policy is a reality today, in the programme of forced sterilisation being perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party upon Uighur minority women in Xinjiang.

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China's modern genocide

By Sarah Ditum

Revulsion at such a monstrous policy is instant and instinctive. Yet similar methods are embraced as liberating in a vastly different context. And that’s how the CCP was able this week to throw the thin moral gruel of individual freedom back at us, in an attempt to reframe a campaign of genocide as a grotesque story of feminist emancipation. In a post which has since been deleted by Twitter, the Chinese Embassy in the US shared a link to an article in a state-run newspaper which said that, as a result of being sterilised, Uighur women were no longer “baby-making machines” and therefore had “more autonomy”.

The way out of this bind is to be franker about the nature of reproductive healthcare, something usually only done by people who oppose it. I support the legal availability of contraception including abortion but, but as one anti-abortion campaigner Lila Rose starkly put it: “Abortion is violence”. Inasmuch as it interrupts and terminates the normal biological process of gestation, it’s hard to disagree: there is an inescapably violent aspect to abortion. Yet Rose soon found herself accused by a pro-choice activist of “violent rhetoric” and “domestic terrorism” – for stating something that is factually true. Liberal, freedom-minded defenders of sometimes objectively violent reproductive healthcare procedures here sought to forcibly prevent further mention of that violence. It seems that where reproductive politics is concerned, violence has a way of creeping into the picture.

The women’s movement that took off in the same decade as the introduction of the contraceptive pill asserted that the personal is political. Today, we should perhaps acknowledge the extent to which the political is also personal. We nod sagely at the insistence that babies should be solely a private matter, but how can human fertility be solely a private matter?

On an intimate level, reproduction is about love, bodies and family continuity. For women, it’s also about what happens inside our very bodies. Motherhood is, literally, a visceral question. At scale, though, fertility is a question of the future workforce, growing or shrinking economies, immigration policy, competing ethnic groups, even of the survival (or not) of a people or culture. These are not small questions. We should not pretend they can be treated as purely private matters.

I believe abortion and contraception should be safe and legal. But it should also be understood as a grave action. There is, inescapably, violence implicit in bringing technology to bear on the creation of new human life, and we can’t bat away that violence away with talk of ‘freedom’. By failing to grasp this nettle, we risk inviting a loveless and easily politicised science into the heart of our society, whose face – behind the surgical mask – is the stuff of nightmares.

It was because of the threat to life, and not for any other reason, that the Judge solemnly authorised the procedure. “This case is not about eugenics,” he emphasised. And even so, even though the details of the case make it very clear that leaving DD to conceive again would do nothing good for her, and that no other course but sterilisation could work, it feels like a terrible conclusion to have reached. A letter from DD is quoted, and her words hang heavily over the proceedings. “My body is mine,” she says, “by human rights.”

My body is mine, by human rights. It seems like the most basic principle, and one which could only be breached in circumstances as extreme as those of DD. But of course, for much of history and in many places, it’s been breached with casual utilitarianism: the reason Mr Justice Cobb had to say his judgement wasn’t about eugenics is that there have been thousands of women like DD whose fertility was stolen from them only on the grounds of improving the gene pool. For as long as contraception has existed, people have been using it to stop the wrong people from breeding.

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Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

Marie Stopes introduced the world to birth control in her book Married Love, then later she tried to stop her son from marrying a woman with glasses on the grounds that weak eyesight was “dysgenic” and should be excluded from the racial stock. Her passionate interest in eugenics put her into unsavoury connections: she gave Hitler a book of her poems.

But then, it also put her in step with a respectable and broad-based international movement of the rationalist and progressive: John Maynard Keynes, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw were among her fellow-travellers. (Given that Ronald Fisher has just had his memorial window removed from Cambridge for his views on eugenics, one wonders how long the Stopes clinics will bear her name.)

Under the influence of the ideas that Stopes espoused, thousands of women judged unworthy of breeding have been cajoled or coerced or downright deceived into sterilisation. They might have been judged “feeble-minded” – under a definition of feeble-mindedness that was expansive enough to cover heavy drinking and “promiscuity” (if you were unmarried and you got pregnant once, that could qualify you as promiscuous). It took the undeniable horror of Nazi Germany to make eugenics synonymous with atrocity; and even then, people have kept putting the idea into practice, while avoiding the word if they can.

Between 2006 and 2010, 150 women in the California prison system were sterilised — some with full consent, but others reported being pressured when they were under sedation for a different operation. One of the doctors involved defended the cost to the state: “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more.”

Because black, Hispanic and Native American woman in the US have higher rates of incarceration than white women, targeting prisoners for sterilisation means (even if inadvertently) targeting racialised women for sterilisation. That, too, is a grim chapter of the eugenic inheritance, in the US and elsewhere.

In Peru, at the end of the last century, a programme under the misnomer Voluntary Surgical Contraception overwhelmingly captured poor and indigenous women, many of whom could not read the Spanish in which the consent forms were written as they signed away their fertility. And then there’s what’s happening now in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.

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What I learned about freedom in Xinjiang

By Geordie Stewart

The persecution of Xinjiang’s Uighurs has only recently made Western headlines, but it is hardly new, and reproductive coercion has long been part of it. What has changed over recent years is how explicitly the goal of exterminating the Uighurs is discussed, and how systematically it is pursued. While President Xi Jinping is a proponent of natalism (he oversaw the end of China’s one-child policy in 2015, for demographic rather than bodily autonomy reasons), not all population growth is wanted population growth.

The babies required are those of the dominant Han group. Chinese of other ethnicities must either assimilate, or be eliminated. State-mandated abortion, IUD insertion and sterilisation of Uighurs has caused the birth rate in Xinjiang (where Uighurs make up 45% of the population) to fall by 24% in the last year; for comparison, the nationwide decline in birth rate is only 4.2%. The attack on reproduction is the most extreme aspect of a programme designed to destroy the Uighur as a people, through prohibition of their language and culture, and “re-education” in brutal camps.

The Uighurs are a problem to the Chinese state because of the way the Chinese ideal of statehood is constituted. David Tobin, Hallsworth Research Fellow in the Political Economy of China at the University of Manchester, explains that since 2012, “policy became about engineering identity”. China’s leadership holds the position that “the disappearance of cultures and language is natural and should be celebrated” — it’s simply a matter of evolution.

While, theoretically, the country is not a Han ethnostate (under Mao, “Han chauvinism” was actually framed as a problem to be abolished), the Han are given a privileged role in the national myth, presented as the stable, civilising entity into which other, less developed groups must be absorbed. It’s for this reason that intermarriage between Han and Uighurs is encouraged, rather than abhorred, in the way that Western racism’s traditional horror of miscegenation might lead you to imagine. The stubborn otherness of the Uighurs is an affront to national unity that must be corrected, by any means necessary.

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Is China preparing for war?

By Maajid Nawaz

If you study anthropology in Xinjiang, at the top of your reading list you’ll find an American name: 19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan researched and recorded the lives of Native Americans, especially the Iroquois. He was also an avid assimilatist, establishing a narrative of civilisation’s progress which has influenced the treatment of the Uighurs: the First Nations would have to give up their nations, and submit to being “civilized, Christianized, and humanized”.

Lewis helped to formulate early plans for the Indian Reservation system. These turned out to be sites not only of deprivation, but of control: Native American rituals were proscribed, and effectively remained so until the 1990s. And the logic of assimilation developed after Lewis’s death, perhaps inevitably, to include reproductive coercion. The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, passed in 1970, subsidised sterilisations: as many as 25% of Native American women of childbearing age underwent the procedure over the next six years. Rote sterilisations were nicknamed “Mississippi appendectomies”.

The surgical banality of this violence shouldn’t obscure the fact that it is violence. For the individual, it’s a vicious sundering of her from her future, as well as a physical attack on her insides. That’s another reason to read the DD judgement: it is unflinching in its account of what must be done when an unwilling woman is sterilised. DD would be surprised at her home. She would be restrained. She would be anaesthetised, and she would wake up infertile and in pain.

Compulsory sterilisation is one of the gravest things that can be imposed on a person. When imposed on her because of her ethnicity, it is a genocide — the female body as ground zero in the pursuit of better breeding. It is being done, methodically and barely concealed, now, to the Uighurs.