1830-1970s: REPRODUCTIVE APARTHEID

Background

Reproductive Apartheid against black women is as ingrained in American history as it is as prevalent in modern times. The abuses and outright torture of black women have been marginalized to focus on the medical advances that come from their trauma. Rooted in slavery, doctors did not get black women’s consent to endure the pain and indignity of experimentation on their reproductive organs due to the women and children being deemed as property. They could not refuse. Doctors became rich and famous off the backs of black women whom they forced experimentation on. Beginning in 1830, Dr. Francois Marie Prevost used slaves to perform experimental cesarean sections on.

Image from http://www.saha.org.za/nonracialism/dorothy_nyembe_and_lilian_ngoyi_leading_a_1952_durban_march.htm

Dr. James Marion Sims, whom is called the “father of gynecology” acquired 11 slaves with vesicovaginal fistual and experimented on them for 4 years without anesthesia at a time with anesthesia was available to white women. He addicted the women to morphine, but gave it to them only after the painful surgeries in order to control them, not to dull the pain of the horrific experiments. Dr. Ephraim McDoweel was the first to perform an ovariotomy (removal of the ovary on four slave women. This abuse against black women doesn’t stop with the abolition of slavery. It continued on well after slavery was abolished.
In 1961, Fannie Lou Hamer, sought medical service to get a beign uterine fibroid tumor removed and the doctor removed her uterus without her consent or knowledge. Hamer’s experience is not rare. Forced sterilization of black women is prominent in recent history.
The “Mississippi Appendectomy” is coined as a term for this since David H. Lass, a Mississippi State Legislator forced sterilization upon welfare Mothers in 1958. In June of 1973, two sisters, Minnie Relf, 14 years of age, and Mary Alice, 12 years of age, where told they were getting a contraceptive shot, but instead where surgically sterilized. When Atlanta’s Southern Poverty Law Center filed a class action lawsuit to end the use federal funds for involuntary sterilization, they discovered 100,000 to 150,000 women had been sterilized and half of them were black. Eugenics promulgated the extermination of black people through birth control. Margaret Sanger promoted reducing the black population by creating “family planning centers” in black areas.
These centers have been the hub of continued experimentation on black women by testing Norplant, Depo-Provera shot, and IUDs on black women with some devastating side effects before the forms of birth control were distributed to white women. In 1951, George Gey snipped cells from the cervix of Henrietta lacks without her knowledge when she was getting treated for terminal cervical cancer without her knowledge at John Hopkins University. The cervical cells stolen generated millions of dollars in profits and her family did not even know about the stolen cells until 20 years after her death.

Psychological Impact

The systematic racism of viewing black women and their children as property during slavery to the perpetuated fallacy of black women viewed as lesser than white women in eugenics to justify continued experimentation on them has traumatized black women emotionally and physically. African American women die in pregnancy or childbirth at a rate of three to four times the rate of white women. Gendered racism has an impact on existing disparities in women’s sexual and reproductive health outcomes.
Infant mortality rate for African Americans is two times higher than it is for Caucasian infants. The disparity of deaths of black babies to white babies are not related to genetics but to the lived experienced of racism in this country. Simone Landrum is one such victim in spring of 2016 pregnant with her third child, she had high blood pressure but was pushed aside from doctors and told to take tylenol for the pain. “When I told him my head still hurt, he said to take more” of the tylenol Landrum says. She continued to note brutal headaches and swelling and she says “It was like he just threw me away” in regards to her doctors not treating her. With lack of treatment for the high blood pressure, Landrum delivered a stillborn baby girl named Harmony. Simone and Harmony’s story is one of many of black women who are pushed aside in the medical field to have either themselves or their babies die.