Black Women, Maternal Mortality, and The Fight For Reproductive Rights

With the recent controversy surrounding Rochelle Hume’s documentary on Black British women and maternal mortality, it seems time to unpack exactly why Black women, globally, have thus far struggled in securing their reproductive rights.

For instance, in the United States Black women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. In the UK, Black women are four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. And in Brazil, a country which has been described by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women as being discriminatory towards “women from the most vulnerable sectors of society such as women of African descent,” Black women are three times more likely to die than non-black women. 

The stats in many black-majority countries are also dire. For example, according to the World Health Organisation, women in Guyana have a 1 in 220 lifetime risk of maternal death, women in Ghana have a 1 in 80 lifetime risk, women in Haiti have a 1 in 67 risk and women in Nigeria have a 1 in 21 risk. For comparison, it is worth noting that the lifetime risk of maternal mortality in Belgium is 1 in 11200, in France it is 1 in 7200 and in the UK it is 1in 8400. In contrast, sub-Saharan African often accounts for more than half of annual global maternal deaths.

Women in many of these developing countries have struggled to secure their reproductive rights due to inadequate medical training. Women die during or soon after pregnancy because they face complications  that would be preventable in the West, like severe bleeding obstructed labour or high blood pressure, but face medical professionals who are unsure of how to treat them. This is often due to lack of funding and medical infrastructure in many developing countries.

However, when it comes to why Black women often struggle to secure their reproductive rights in the West, the conversation goes far beyond medical resources and infrastructure but in fact links back to histories of structural racism.

In the US, for example, Black women have historically struggled to secure reproductive rights. When enslaved Africans were brought over to the United States, many women were raped and sexually assaulted by their masters, often producing children who would be born into slavery. As birth control was not available, these enslaved women were forced to bear these children but, as Angela Davis recounts in her book Women, Race and Class, many enslaved African would try to take control of their reproductive rights anyway. Many of these women would do so by self-aborting their babies or committing infanticide to avoid bringing a child into a world of never-ending slavery. As quoted in Davis’ book, after Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman, killed her child she:

“rejoiced that the girl was dead—“now she would never know what a woman suffers as a slave.”

During the era of slavery Black women had so little control over their reproductive rights that J Marion Sims, who is today known as the “father of gynaecology,” was able to conduct intrusive gynaecological research on enslaved women, without using  anaesthesia. And even after the abolition of slavery, Black women continued to struggle to gain control over their reproductive rights. In fact, in this era, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, eugenics was becoming ever-more popular and organisations like  Planned Parenthood were developing plans to sterilize the “lesser races.” This meant that Black women had to be continue to be vigilant about what sort of healthcare organisations they sought support from, as several were sinister organisations who wanted to sterilize Black women in the guise of supporting their reproductive rights.  Indeed, this was not just an early twentieth century issue, but a twentieth century (and arguably still a twenty-first century issue), with the case of the Relf sisters making international news when it was reported that two black sisters, aged 12 and 14, had been involuntarily sterilized by a federally-funded clinic.

Therefore, as Black women in the US have always had to struggle to secure their reproductive rights it is unsurprising that they continue to struggle to secure them, and face difficulty in being protected from premature death during childbirth.

However, these struggles have not only afflicted Black women in the US but have also impacted the lives of Black women in the British Empire and Britain too. For example, in nineteenth century colonial Jamaica there were a few cases of infanticide, because in an environment where contraception and abortion were not readily available, lower-class dark-skinned Jamaican women would kill their children often due to lacking the funds to take care of their children. Due to widespread colorism within colonial Jamaican society, often the darker skinned Black women would be impoverished whilst the lighter-skinned Black women would have more access to wealth and high-status.

Fast-forward to 1970s and 80s Britain, and the descendants of some of these women protested against what they saw to be racism in reproductive healthcare in this country. In the 70s and 80s a controversial contraceptive drug, Depo-Provera, was being recommended to some Black British women, who were not warned of the consequences of taking this drug which was alleged to have dangerous long-term side effects. Therefore, members of the Brixton Black Women’s Group lamented that in Britain “ a Black woman is often only offered an abortion if she agrees to undergo sterilization at the same time.”

However, what the history of the Brixton Black Women’s Group, and the many other Black women who have fought for their reproductive rights in the past, illustrates to us is that we can fight against medical racism, we can fight against injustice and that if we continue fighting there will come a day when eventually things will change.