Dorothy E. Roberts

After Congress banned importing enslaved people in 1808, slavers relied on enslaved women giving birth to grow the workforce.

As Dorothy Roberts puts it in her seminal book, Killing the Black Body, the children of enslaved women belonged to the slave owner, quote, "From the moment of their conception." She lays it all out in that book, Killing the Black Body, and if you care about reproductive justice and you haven't read it, please go read it.

I honestly read it once a year.

Black women fought back against this white supremacist bullshit.

Black women saying that and the police being called, child protective services being called.

Professor Dorothy Roberts has written brilliantly about this.

And so I noticed that.

Now, what was very interesting in the justifications behind police being called, criminal prosecutions, the arrest, and then also Black women serving time, right? So any number of cases that I've written about where these women are coerced into plea deals of 10 years, 15 years, 20 years incarceration because they had a baby that was born low birth weight, but healthy, or that they had a stillbirth, right? And what I began to notice is in the space of assisted reproductive technologies, which people would say, well, that's different.