That Which Is Born Follows the Womb
Pulling out what I felt was the most interesting piece of my latest report.
This excerpt from my interactive report entitled The U.S. Black Maternal and Child Health Crisis Is Centuries in the Making struck me as the most relevant to this newsletter. I mean, it’s health history. I can’t say I enjoyed writing it—who can enjoy this work?—but I left it more educated and feeling better equipped to continue the good fight.
I was also able to include a few photos of enslaved families1. Royalty fees aside2, finding pre-emancipation images3 that offer non-violent, non-racist depictions of enslaved adults and children is challenging. We simply do not see them often. (I was able to add an additional photo that was not included in the report at the bottom of this newsletter.)
I wanted to provide these images alongside the history detailed in this section because juxtaposing the Black familial unit—again, shown in a non-violent, non-racist way—against the harm caused to us felt as if it deconstructed the lies we’ve been fed about Black families. I wanted images that included Black men, women, and children who may not even be blood-related but who are, in some way, taking care of one another. The text tells the other part of the truth: That broken blood familial ties were a common and intentional consequence of selling human beings. That is what actually happened.
In 1824, Mary, a formerly enslaved woman, filed for her children’s freedom. Mary was emancipated once she turned 31, as requested in the will of her first enslaver, and it seemed pretty straightforward that the status of her four children—Maria, Nancy, Solomon, and Samuel—would follow suit.
A Virginia court disagreed. Since her children were born before she was freed, her children would remain enslaved. According to one of the judges who ruled against the case, emancipation was not a transfer of “the property of a slave to” themselves. Instead, the current enslaver was entitled to the “increase” in “property” unless the original enslaver willed otherwise. In simpler terms, the “increase” in “property” refers to the children born to an enslaved mother, meaning those babies, those human beings, now belonged to their mother’s enslaver, regardless of whether she was freed at a later date.
It seems like a convoluted, hypocritical doctrine because it is. The precedent for Mary’s children was set in 1662 when the state of Virginia still belonged to Britain, meaning before America was born herself, those colonizing the land found ways to bend the rules to their benefit. Officials ensured that enslaved Black children would belong to whoever owned their mother via partus sequitur ventrem. This legal doctrine translates to “that which is born follows the womb,” which was then woven into the laws of enslavement. It mandated children born in the colonies inherited their mothers’ social standing—meaning if a child’s mother was enslaved when they were born, so were they. Enslavement became a Black child’s codified birthright, and their mother’s womb became the conduit. As such, birthing became a way of ensuring that an enslaved workforce would remain.
Still, enslavers initially avoided seeking medical care for enslaved persons. They frequently accused the ill of "malingering” or pretending to be sick to get out of work. If a doctor was called, they often contributed to the systemic mistreatment of the enslaved. In her book Medical Apartheid, author Harriet Washington recounts an instance where a doctor started his examination of an enslaved man by stating that pretending to be ill was a common trait among Black people. Physicians would exchange notes on which strategies returned enslaved persons to work the quickest, often resorting to violent medical procedures or outright physical abuse—which were cited as being the most effective tactics.
The foundation of modern Western medicine began on the plantation. Race became a biological justification for mistreatment with the specific aim of reinforcing notions that Black people were inferior. Enslaved persons were exposed to substandard living conditions, inadequate sanitation, and food insecurity because of it. Lacking access to clean water and suitable clothing increased their disease susceptibility. These environmental conditions also prevented them from engaging in activities promoting health, such as securing sufficient medical care or rest while ill.
When the transatlantic slave trade was banned in 1808, white doctors and enslavers became more interested in the health of their chattel—particularly an enslaved woman’s ability to bear children. Birthing during enslavement was frequently orchestrated for economic gain. “Strong” enslaved women were sold as “breeders” and forced to reproduce so that more children could be birthed into enslavement. And it’s estimated that enslavers or other white men sexually assaulted 58 percent of Black women. The children were often stillborn or died within the first year of their life. When the U.S. first began breaking infant mortality data down by race in 1850, the overall rate that year was nearly 400 babies per every 1,000 live births—a jarring number that had been steadily declining since 1800 when it was 463. In 1850, according to official numbers, the rate for Black babies was 340 per 1,000 compared to 216.8 per 1,000 for white babies.
As Black kids aged, their growth was slower than that of non-enslaved children. Their diet also lacked essential nutrients such as protein, niacin, magnesium, calcium, and vitamin D, resulting in many health issues like night blindness and rickets.
“Without a well-developed field of pediatrics, White physicians had little to offer,” write historians Deirdre Cooper Owens and Sharla Fett. “Consequently, they often blamed enslaved mothers and midwives, using harsh gendered and racist language4, for infant deaths that were more likely a result of mothers’ hard labor and poor nutrition. Beyond these verbal attacks, antebellum U.S. physicians also began to use their access to Black and enslaved bodies to expand their scientific knowledge and build their professional reputations.”
Results from nonconsensual gynecological and reproductive surgeries performed on Black women were often hailed as feats of medical advancement. Between 1845 and 1849, James Marion Sims, a physician who contributed heavily to the development of modern gynecology, maimed Lucy, Anarcha, and other Black women who were unable to refuse or consent to the procedures. Black women’s genitalia and other body parts were often displayed as medical specimens.
During Jim Crow (1865-1965), Black people continued to be terrorized. Women and children experienced forced sterilization via state eugenics programs. Lynchings, which often involved genital mutilation and public gang rapes, were also at their peak, and state laws did not protect Black people from these evils. In 1946, the Hill-Burton Act authorized the use of federal funds to build segregated facilities within hospitals, exacerbating the inequities in healthcare. After the Civil Rights Movement, such exploitation continued—a prime example being Johns Hopkins University taking a sample of Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cancer cells without her consent5. HeLa cells, named for the first two letters of her first and last name, were integral in many significant medical feats, such as developing vaccines for polio, HPV, and COVID-19, testing and treatment for various cancers, and understanding how HIV advances into AIDS.
I’m using the phrase family in the non-nuclear sense as there are many instances where the children being cared for aren’t blood-related to the adults caring for them.
And lemme tell y’all—Getty had a handful of images available. But paying Getty for images of an enslaved family whose descendants aren’t receiving those funds enraged me. So I didn’t do it. I stuck to open-access images and paid ones I can access through my work. In this NYT article, you can read more about families fighting to retain ownership of their ancestors’ photographs.
Meaning photographs, sketches, engravings, etc.
This arguably set the stage for the “mother blame” Black women experience today, as well as the focus on their individual health behaviors or conditions while fueling the belief that Black women make poor health decisions.
While the university denies directly profiting from the sample, they’ve made them widely available to other pharmaceutical and research institutions that have.