With the apparent refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court to
defend Roe v. Wade, White women are waking up
to the reality their reproductive rights are
in danger, although the wealthy will always
have access to abortion.
However, Black women’s bodies have always been in peril,
with white people - white men - seeking to
control them. While the mob of white men would
deny women agency over their own bodies, this
is nothing new to Black women, who have dealt
with this in America for hundreds of years.
Black women were exploited by the slave master, who bred
them, raped them and forced them to bear
children. As property, Black women had no
right to marry, and no right over their
children or themselves. Freedom came through
jumping off the slave ship, escaping the
plantation or taking one’s life. In Toni
Morrisson’s novel Beloved - as it surely happened countless times in real-life
history - Sethe killed her baby with a handsaw
rather than allow her to be subjected to a
life of bondage.
White men organized and were deputized as slave catchers,
and hired as bounty hunters to track down
Black women, children and men - whether slave
or free - and empowered by the Fugitive Slave
Act. Sheroes such as Harriett Tubman seized
the reins and took control, liberating herself
and risking her own life to save others from
bondage.
Black women served as the stereotypical sexual plaything
of white men (Jezebel), the angry Black woman
(Sapphire) and the Mammy. And the field of
gynecology made great advances at the expense
of Black women. The so-called father of modern
Gynecology, J.
Marion Sims, performed medical experiments on at least ten enslaved
Black women without anesthesia - on the racist
assumption Black women felt no pain. After
perfecting his techniques on the traumatized
Black women subjected to his painful
experiments, he performed procedures on
anesthetized white women. Sims’ statue stood
in New York’s Central
Park until 2018, at a time when America began to
reevaluate the people it honored and
memorialized in stone.
Even when it came to the birthing of Black babies, white
men succeeded in controlling the market and
keeping Black women out of midwifery. Black
women at one point were half
of all midwifes, posing a competitive economic threat to white male
gynecologists following the Civil War. These
white doctors led a smear campaign to paint
Black midwifes as “unhygienic, barbarous,
ineffective, non-scientific, dangerous, and
unprofessional” according to the ACLU. This
was the origin of an anti-abortion movement
rooted in white supremacy in the U.S.
And it is no accident that there are racial
disparities in maternal and infant health in America, including
maternal and infant mortality rates. As a
vulnerable population whose health is in
danger, Black women continue to face
compromised health due to systemic racism, and
are in more jeopardy than ever. Systemic
racism and white supremacy always proceeded
under the assumption that Black women’s bodies
were not their own control, but rather were
the possession of white men.
