MODULE 2 - RACISM + BIRTH
History
It’s difficult to address the racial disparities in birth today without knowing, acknowledging, and understanding the past. Why don’t we start with the obvious - slavery. There are plenty of things that they don’t teach us in school about slavery in America.
Once they abolished the importation of new slaves across the Atlantic from Africa in 1807, slaves were then forced to breed. Slave masters, such as Thomas Jefferson, felt that a slave that can have babies every 2 years was more profitable than the best man on their farms.
In the 1830s, ”negro medicine” was developed which was basically a way for white America to justify the enslavement of Africans by “proving” their inferiority. This is also during the time that enslaved women were being experimented on extensively by “pioneers” in medical science, such as James Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology”. Done so, obviously, against their will to the detriment of their health, wellbeing, and with no regards to their fertility.
They tested procedures like c-sections and ovariotomies. The kicker - the majority of these surgeries were done without any form of anesthesia. When colleagues couldn’t be found to assist with brutal surgical experimentation, other slaves were forced to hold the test subject down.
The lack of anesthesia was due to the belief that black people did not feel pain and anxiety like whites. When you say that someone doesn’t feel pain that is, in essence, saying that they are less than or other than human, don’t you think?
In the 1900s, with the wave of new immigrants coming to United States, the American Eugenics Movement was developed. The main goal of the AEM was to reduce the childbearing potential of the poor and disabled. One of the most well-known leaders was Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and creator of the ”Negro Project”. The Negro Project was a series of family planning centers that pushed birth control in the black south and was even supported by W.E.B. DuBois.
Many states approved sterilization laws. The sad thing is that often sterilization was forced, like the case of Fannie Lou Hamer in 1961, who went to the hospital to have a tumor removed but was given a hysterectomy without her knowledge or consent. It was something that became so common in the south that it was known as the “Mississippi appendectomy”.
African American babies were no longer economically valuable at this point and went from being resource to a nuisance.
That’s not even where it ends. In the 1990s, a contraception called Norplant was specifically introduced and marketed to black teenagers in Baltimore schools. Former KKK Grandmaster, David Duke, introduced legislation to give women on welfare a $100 reward if they agreed to get Norplant. The bill didn’t pass but it did spark new debates about forced contraception.
These facts are just tips of the iceberg in what has been going on to blacks in the country in the name of medical advancements.
I highly recommend reading the book “Medical Apartheid” by Harriet A. Washington to learn more about medical exerpimentation on blacks from colonial times to now.
Women of Color in Childbirth
There’s a lot of dynamics that you need to understand when it comes to black women during childbirth. Keep in mind that I’m speaking from personal experience and this does not apply to every black woman or family of color. So, here’s a few things to consider.
We RARELY see women who look like us represented in the birth community. This creates a kind of catch-22 situation. Because we aren’t seeing ourselves depicted in birth photography, we don’t think that we hire birth photographers so there aren’t a lot of us who actually hire a birth photographer.
We also often do not see the point or value of birth photography because it also feels like an invasion of our privacy. Births can have the minimum amount of support, like how I was with my first child - it was just my husband and I and the hospital staff- or births can have a lot of extended family laughing and joking and being “extra”. They are all variations of normal, just like what you would find at a non-POC birth. We often prefer to spend the money on more tangible things, like clothes, food, and bills to take care of our families, than to spend unnecessary money on some pictures.
We come from families that are stereotyped as being fatherless, poor, ghetto, and criminals. Yes, we do have people that fit into those categories but not everyone. I, as well as a good chunk of the people I know, grew up in a house with their father, living comfortable (not clearly struggling), in a decent neighborhood, and around people who have never been arrested in their lives. So, make sure you check the stereotypes at the door.
Culturally, epidurals and hospital births and c-sections are encouraged amongst peers. And while we do breastfeed, many choose not to for personal reasons. We are conditioned to think and feel that that method is the norm and the most safe and practical, and we often don’t even consider looking into other options.
In many ways, the ways that should matter as a birth professional, you can expect the same of a birth with a WOC that you would with a non-WOC. It’s not like we are some kind of rare unicorns or anything.
Below you will see a short film featuring 3 WOC and their stories. I hope that they bless you to hear as they did to me while recording them.