This experience of pregnancy is different for a Black mother. The care she is likely to receive — which determines whether she will survive giving birth and child rearing — varies drastically from her white counterparts. Unsurprisingly, it all ties back to the peculiar institution, the rotten roots that this nation has yet to cut out.
The gruesome history of exploitation did not end with the abolition of slavery, nor will it go away without critical confrontation. The systemic discrimination and medical racism faced by Black women have led to disparities in care, harming experiences with pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood.
As the daughter of a Black mother and the granddaughter of many Black women before her, I write from the ivory tower of Harvard College because of their sacrifices. One great-grandmother was born on a Mississippi plantation, and the other, in Ku Klux Klan-controlled Dallas, Texas. Both of their children were born to the pre-civil rights sorrows of the deep South, and their daughters bore the dual pain of racism and sexism.
In the 19th century, in what was supposedly a radical democracy built on freedom and equality, inherited slave status from one’s mother was justified by “othering” the Black mother. She was the bane of American society — the cause of all its failures. She was said to transmit immutable degradation to her children that made them incompatible with the ideals of citizenship and perfect for slave labor. The Black mother was the “domineering downfall” of the Black nuclear family. She was “sexually deviant and stupid”. Black mothers were no more than “a mammy,” doomed to raise white children, but having no control over their own. She would later be classified as a lazy “welfare queen” sitting at home and birthing children to mooch off the government.
If the Black mother was inherently degenerate, her children would be too. They were painted as the cause of all of post-slavery American woes. Her sons were “perpetual thieves,” “criminals,” and “rapists.” In fact, this stereotype was widely used to justify the lynchings of Black men in the Jim Crow South and usurp legal due process. Her daughters would also share her fate: a bad mother and the most mocked and disdained group in the pre-Civil Rights Era. As Dorothy Roberts, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, aptly concludes, “blaming the Black mother, then, is a way of subjugating the Black race as a whole.”
All of these stereotypes have shaped how Black mothers practice motherhood. But this story is partially superimposed and manufactured to justify the limiting of Black reproductive freedom as a tool of racial oppression. As a result, Black mothers are the victims of systematic disparities in reproductive rights, health outcomes, and motherhood practices.
During enslavement, Black women had no control over their reproductive health. They were often given incentives to bear children — like shorter work days or more food — and punished if they did not. The creation of a self-replenishing pool of slave labor was the primary goal of enslavers. As a result, many Black women resisted through refusal of sexual intercourse, self-induced abortions, and infanticide. Mrs. John Little, an escaped enslaved woman, recounted the torture she faced in 1841 when she was questioned by a slave-holder about a possible abortion by another enslaved woman. Unfortunately, Little’s experience was not rare.
To make matters worse, Black enslaved women were also forced to be the subjects of early medical studies. The “father of gynecology,” James Marion Sims, made his most breakthrough revelations by experimenting on enslaved Black women without their consent.
These experiments were not the only reproductive harm Black women have had to endure. From about 1910 to 1970, thousands of Black women and Indigenous women were given non-consensual hysterectomies, the removal of the whole or parts of the uterus. They were painted as abusers of the welfare system or simply unfit for motherhood. My great-grandmother, Earlee Rucker, was a victim of this inhumane, cruel, and dehumanizing practice. After giving birth to her only son, Mark Hodge Sr., her uterus was removed against her will. The atrocities committed against vulnerable populations do not exist in a vacuum, and their effects are felt for generations. This practice was never about safeguarding children; it was about creating a whiter America, one free from the supposed plights of Blackness.
Today, the right to their own reproductive capacity is not the only worry for Black women, and arguably all women living under restrictive post-Roe abortion laws. However, Black women face a 2.6 times higher rate of maternal mortality than white women in the United States. This staggering statistic is not the result of some genetic predisposition, it is the child of medical racism — the racial disparities in medical outcomes that result from a history of systemic racism and discrimination. Black women often report doctors not believing their pain or symptoms, which is a direct result of 18th-century pseudo-science that claimed Black people felt less pain than white people. Longstanding false beliefs have plagued the medical industry and resulted in disparate pain assessment and treatment across racial groups. This, combined with the long history of medical sexism, which results in higher rates of misdiagnosis and longer diagnosis processes for women, has led to the particularly distressing experience of Black women.
Even more, Black patients lead in preterm births, often a result of inadequate prenatal care, leading to undiagnosed and untreated pregnancy complications. Many of these disparities can be explained by differences in healthcare coverage and facilities; however, these inequities persist even when accounting for such factors.
These worse health outcomes exist across all income and education levels. This is not a phenomenon of being poor, it is a phenomenon of being a Black pregnant person in the United States.
Even after childbirth, Black mothers continue to face racialized sexism in their parenting journey. Black infant and child mortality rates are 2.4 times higher than the white mortality rates, with the leading cause of death being low birthweight Even before a baby experiences the psychological and sociological effects of race, their body becomes a victim of it.
The intertwining of racism and sexism creates something wholly on its own. Author Bell Hooks points out in her book “Ain’t I A Woman” that in social discourse, the word “woman” conjures up images of White women and the word “Black” conjures up images of Black men. Where does that leave Black women? One thing is certain: Black women face systemic challenges and barriers in their motherhood journey. Yet this fact alone cannot truly encapsulate the implications of medical racism and sexism. Black mothers matter, and their health should too.
In response to these stereotypes and systemic barriers, Black mothers have defined their own path: ‘the strong Black mother.’ She ingrained in her children how to talk, walk, and move in a society that has historically dehumanized them. She is shackled by fear for them. She fears their every interaction with the legal system: from the initial police stop to sentencing. She fears that they will be limited by the color of their skin, which she has been told is the curse she passes down to them. She fears that their Blackness shall lead to their imprisonment, injury, or death.
In a country built on liberty and equality, we all must reflect on interweaving injustices, ones unseen but deeply felt. We all must work to create a brighter future, one in which the color of our skin is not a factor in whether we will survive birth or mother our children.
