Black Reproductive Health

The ability to control when to have a child has had different histories for women of color and white women in the United States.

Then as now, African American women experienced higher levels of poverty and risk of dying in childbirth than their white American sisters. Before Roe v Wade between 1965/67, black maternal death rates were fourteen times that of white women. Nurses in Georgia remembered their black patients using “sticks, rocks, chopsticks, rubber or plastic tubes, gauze or cotton packing, ball point pens, coat hangers, or knitting needles,” in abortion attempts.

Also complicating the situation is the fact that for many years in the mid-20th century, black American women endured forced medical sterilizations by the white and largely male medical community: their sterilization rate was much higher than white women’s. These operations were largely conducted by white male doctors. The American Medical Association, founded in 1847, had banned black people (in 2008 the AMA issued a formal apology for this apartheid). Understandably, black women had a generally high level of distrust towards the medical establishment.

And peeling back the decades of time, we can see how much African American women’s role in their reproductive history had changed. After all, before the Civil War, both abortion and birth control were completely legal for all women. The duties of gynecological health fell upon midwives, and black midwives attended to virtually all black women’s reproductive needs, whether abortion or childbirth. The photo here shows a black nurse showing black midwives how to use a portable scale. During the early 20th century, gynecology was taken over by the medical establishment, who deliberately edged many African American midwives out of their profession, seeing them as competition.

The fact that many of the American states likely to prohibit abortion are those which had been slave states is not an irrelevant fact.