Mother’s day
2025 Mother’s Day
On this Mother’s Day 2025, MPCPMP is revisiting health care for African American women and mothers. As this nation was formed, European settlers viewed Africans, and particularly enslaved women, as assets and a reliable source of potential wealth.
The medical profession was entangled in the institution of slavery from its beginnings. From the earliest origins of chattel slavery in North America, Europeans with medical training served the interests of slaveowners rather than enslaved patients.
- Deidre Cooper Owens and Sharla M. Fett
As a pregnant Black Ob/Gyn . . . I was afraid for my life because of what I see every day as a physician: Black women’s pain treated as inconsequential, their heavy bleeding regarded as non-emergencies, their high fevers deemed nominal, their high blood pressure neglected. I routinely witness health disparities in maternal health while fighting on the frontlines for dignified care. The disparity of maternal health outcomes between Black women and white women points to racism — not race — as the true risk factor for that disparity.
- Joy Cooper, MD
In 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm . . . What she produces is an addition to the capital labors while a male slave’s labors disappear in mere consumption.
Since the capture and arrival of Africans to the North American mainland, women in bondage were considered property and as such were vulnerable and victimized because of their status and gender. As Dr. Vanessa Gamble, physician and medical historian at George Washington University, explains, “These women could not consent. These women also had value to the slaveholders for production and reproduction — how much work they could do in the field, how many enslaved children they could produce” (npr.org).
The concept of wealth dependent upon labor, skills and knowledge generated through the bodies of women of African descent expanded and served as the basis for unequal treatment, experimentation, institutional racism, and abuse in health care. One such example of this, but not the only one by far, can be seen in the work of Dr. James Marion Sims. Lauded as the “Father of Gynecology,” Sims practiced medical torture on Black women.
In the 1830s, he and others performed C-sections and other horrendous acts and experiments, often without anesthesia because Black women were viewed as less sensitive to pain. They were his “lab mice.” One woman, Anarcha, was subjected to as many as 30 of his extremely painful surgeries in 3 ½ years. Of the many women on whom he conducted his agonizing experiments, we only know the names of three of them; Lucy and Betsey are the other two (anarchalucybetsey.org/).
In his memoir, Sims writes, “. . . there was never a time that I could not, at any day, have had a subject for operation. But my operations all failed.” A monument to Sims in Central Park, NY, finally removed in April 2018, honored his contributions to medical science (contributions based on his physical and psychological abuse of Black women) with no mention of the human beings who served as the basis for his advancements in the field. His unethical experimentation on and disregard for the humanity of enslaved women who had no rights to “informed consent” (the power to refuse) continues to be a stain on the medical profession.
These practices and perceptions related to Black women and their health care prevailed and continue into the present day. The Black community has faced ongoing racial and social bias in reproductive health from within and without. As examples:
Negative attitudes toward Black babies, in both Black and White communities, reflect the perception that these children have lost their value and are considered a drain on resources or are a nuisance. Even the eminent African American social scientist W.E.B. DuBois argues pejoratively in a commentary in support of birth control that “. . . the mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously.”
“In the 1950s, as the Civil Rights Movement’s momentum grew, southern politicians, local officials and medical personnel began embracing the use of sterilization to maintain their white-supremacist hold in the slowly eroding Jim Crow South,” defended legislatively by the coded language of who should and should not have children (mississippifreepress). Fannie Lou Hamer refers to a practice of uninformed and involuntary sterilization, including her own, as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
As a result of social and racial bias as well as extremely limited training of providers and quality health care, “. . . pregnancy-related mortality is three to four times higher among Black women than among White women,” and “ . . . the disparity between Black and White infant deaths today is actually greater than it was under antebellum slavery” (Owens and Fett)
Maternal health care, reproductive and birthing justice — There is a need to put into context the lack of pre- and post-natal care for Black mothers. Today, there are programs and projects across this nation created to change how health care is administered to Black mothers and their babies. This month we focus on and share with you the first of a two-part series about a healthcare proposal designed by Women of the Movement (Chapel Hill, NC). The initiative will incorporate the intergenerational community memory and experience of Black women, with particular emphasis on training practitioners in obstetrics/gynecology as well as medical residents in best practices to ensure quality care for mothers and babies.
Please follow this link that introduces their promotional video that connects community activism with maternal health care — Pivotal Application: Relational Care with Women of the Movement
Happy Mother’s Day!
Suggested Reading:
Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington