Why am I passionate about this?
Iām a fiction writer interested in exploring big historical moments through the lives of ordinary people. The extensive fight for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy for women, specifically black women, has long been a concern, admittedly for selfish reasons. This ever-shifting terraināfrom eugenics and sterilization to coerced birth control and the rise in maternal mortality ratesāwas initially perplexing to me and it took a great deal of reading to make sense of it. Such research not only informed my historical novel, Night Wherever We Go, but much of how I understand the world. Iād argue one canāt fully comprehend the current abortion rights moment without understanding how race and reproduction are so deeply intertwined.
Tracey's book list on race and reproductive rights
Why did Tracey love this book?
Schwartzās book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how central black womenās reproduction was to the project of American slavery.
The book illustrates how new doctors needing specialization and clientele found common cause with slaveholdersā needs to control the reproductive capabilities of their enslaved workforce. The ongoing conflicts between slaveholders, enslaved women, and the doctors who were employed to thwart any attempts of resistance and autonomy on their part is truly mind-blowing.
Anyone tracking our current state of affairs post the Dobbs decision, with doctors in states like Texas being forced to choose between providing women necessary healthcare or complying with state law, can see the looming shadow of the history explored in Schwartzās illuminating book.
1 author picked Birthing a Slave as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realize that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage.
In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage theā¦