Equating Slavery and Abortion: Where are the Women in this story?

Cross-posted at Speaker’s Corner

This weekend, on the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the conservative website RedState took up the argument that the enslaved in antebellum America are equivalent to fetuses in the womb:

Twice in our nation’s history, arrogant and power-mad Supreme Court Justices have declared that certain humans are exempt from the promise of the Declaration and the guarantees of the Constitution.

In the first instance, in Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court drew a line and declared that those on the “slave” side of the line were entitled to no protection from the law, and could be treated with impunity by their masters.  That slaves were human was beyond dispute; instead, the Court found solace in an artificial and tortured distinction which treated those humans belonging to the category of “slave” as a special kind of human that was not to be treated like the rest of humanity.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court repeated the same exercise, this time engaging in spectacular mental gymnastics with the word “person”….  And thus the Supreme Court drew a line and declared that those humans on the “person” side were entitled to the right to life, and those on the “non-person” side (as defined by the Court) were not. The combined effect of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton was that a line was drawn at physical location within a woman’s womb.

Last week, Rick Santorum said that Obama should be anti-choice because he is a black man and so had family in the slave trade or something (though, of course, Obama’s father was Kenyan, not African-American so…).  Glenn Beck has, of course, said this about slavery and abortion and you can find these ideas on blog posts around the interwebs.  Andrew Sullivan responds,

I’d add, however, that there is an obvious difference in as much as slave-owners did not own those “slaves” within their own bodies. Women do. And the defense of the freedom of that woman to do with her body as she sees fit is far more complicated than ending plantations.

I want to address the fact that this reading of history by conservative anti-choice advocates removes the enslaved female from that history (which is, incidentally, how much of the history of the enslaved is written – “the enslaved” is assumed to be male unless otherwise noted).  Santorum, Beck, and the editors at RedState are talking about an institution of slavery that would not have had a place for abortion, that wasn’t full of sexual assault, that didn’t explicitly and coercively exploit women’s bodies for both production and re-production.  What about those female slaves who used abortion to make sure that no child of theirs was born into an enslaved state, to destroy the property of their masters, to get rid of the result of a rape (an act that was completely and totally legal), to stop their already strained bodies from one more, very possibly deadly labor?

According to Stephanie Camp,

[Enslaved] women employed their bodies in a wide variety of ways, from seizing control over the visual representation of their physical selves in narrative and photographic forms (both of which were in enormous demand among nineteenth-century northerners) to abortion. (The Journal of Southern History, v. 68, n. 3, Aug 2002, p. 541)

In 1981, Michael Johnson, while trying to refute the idea that slave infants were smothered, provided primary source evidence that enslaved women were known to abort their children.  [NB: Of course, as with all sources about enslaved peoples, we should assume exaggeration and even creation of information to fit a select narrative since these sources were not written by the enslaved but rather people who were or could have been slave owners.  In this case, that slave owners, needing their enslaved women to reproduce in order to help build their supply of slaves, might have believed that women were punishing them and taking away their property through abortion.  Assuming the worst of the enslaved, as they almost always did, they could have and probably did use hyperbole when they discussed the rates of abortion among the enslaved.  Of course, women probably did abort their fetuses for the reasons about which the slaveholders were worried – it’s like the slaveholders understood that they were participating in a messed up system, one that would lead women to abortion rather than birthing.  Even if these primary sources exaggerated the amount of times women aborted, it is enough to know that white slaveholders were aware that enslaved women were having abortions at all, that abortions were part of life on the plantation for women.]:

Several antebellum medical writers commented on the dangers of hard work for pregnant slave women.  A Tennessee physician, John H. Morgan, wrote that “the exposure to which negro women are subjected as field hands during menstruation and pregnancy,” along with “The promiscuous and excessive intercourse of the sexes” were “among the principal causes of sterility and abortion.”  “And many diseases to which they are incident arise from the same cause,” he added.  In particular, he argued that “The functions of menstruation and pregnancy being so peculiarly delicate, negroes suffer during those periods from hard labor and exposure in bad weather, frequently being badly fed and badly clothed…” (The Journal of Southern History, v. 47, n. 4, Nov 1981, p. 511)

This source was written by a Southern doctor in 1860.  It was titled, “An Essay on the Causes of the Production of Abortion Among Our Negro Population.” It was published in the Nashville Journal of Medicine and Surgery.  The above quote came from the medical establishment attempting to reconcile and end the problem of abortion in the enslaved population.  And, according to Johnson, the doctor tied abortion not only to promiscuity (a stereotype of enslaved peoples) but also to the the labor of the enslaved, to the brutality of the system.

Johnson continues,

A Georgia physician, Edmund Monroe Pendleton, wrote that the much greater incidence of abortion and miscarriage among slaves “either teaches that slave labor is inimical to the procreation of the species from exposure, violent exercise, &c., or, as the planters believe, the blacks are possessed of a secret by which they destroy the foetus at an early stage of gestation.”  Pendleton did not doubt the existence of abortifacients, but he considered it a “question for the philosopher and philanthropist” whether slave women “were acquainted with them…and whether the natural instinct of the mother to love and protect her offspring should be overruled so frequently by the moral obtundity of this class of people.” (ibid, p. 511 – 512)

Pendelton wrote that in 1850, clearly under the assumption that enslaved women “frequently”, against better moral judgment, voluntarily aborted fetuses.  The high number of cases of abortion was either attributed to the harsh labor conditions that would cause abortion and miscarriage OR black magic.  While Pendleton and the slave holders could have seriously believed it was black magic (as the slaves might have, too), we can probably assert with confidence now that between those two possible causes, it would have been the “violent exercise” of slave life that played a larger role in miscarriage or women choosing to end their pregnancies.

Jennifer Morgan, in attempting to explain the realities of the (sex) lives of enslaved women in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, wrote this:

The possibility of successful fertility control must coexist with a recognition of all that would make a woman physically or psychologically unwilling or unable to bear a child.  Nutritionally inadequate diets lowered fertility, and the labor regime rendered many women unable to conceive or to carry fetuses to term.  But in addition to external suppressors of fertility, many women may have taken steps to avoid conception.  At the very least, the extreme contrast in fertility rates among enslaved women in the Caribbean and those of the American South suggests that the question of fertility control must be taken seriously.  Women enslaved on plantations where planters’ regimes negatively affected their fertility may have seen the absence of pregnancy as proof of an emmenagogues‘ effectiveness or evidence that the deities too were reluctant to bring another life into such a place.  Moreover, when an attempt to control fertility failed, an unwanted or unstoppable pregnancy might have illustrated one’s powerlessness as much as one’s agency.  I would like to avoid romanticizing these women who, like Bessie, come into focus at least in part because of their children.  Presuming that Bessie loved and nurtured these children is dangerous, for ambivalence toward and distance from her ‘pickininies’ would have been as logical an emotion as any for Bessie and the other mothers with whom she was enslaved.  It becomes difficult, if not impossible, given the realities of disease, overwork, and fertility control, to accurately situate enslaved women’s experience of childbirth and parenting.  Mechanisms for interrupting the violation of enslavement could certainly have included a withdrawal from voluntary intimate contact, from the extension of self in community.  In that context, the birth of a child would have done nothing to alleviate sorrow; indeed, it would only have made the load heavier.  (Laboring Women, p. 114 – 115)

When people talk about slavery and abortion as if they existed in two separate realities, they are ignoring so much and giving enslaved women very little credit and no agency.  At the same time, as Morgan so beautifully writes it, having a child as an enslaved woman was not the wonderful thing we like to imagine motherhood and childhood to be.  I think that is REALLY important when we think of the institution of slavery, abortion nowadays, and the history of enslaved women.

Anti-choice advocates often assume that the world will be better if abortion is illegal, that forcing women to have children that they don’t want for whatever reason (they can’t afford them, they can’t take on the emotional burden, they just don’t want them) would be solved by the mystical happy powers that motherhood brings to a person’s life and that the childhood of the fetus, by definition, would be great, carefree, wonderful, and worth living.  But looking back through the lens of history and the eyes of enslaved women, the intersection of slavery and abortion doesn’t teach us that abortion is wrong and evil and inhumane.  Instead, it teaches us that the lives of women are complicated, often dependent on resources and support beyond themselves, dictated by people whose interest in their bodies are divergent from their own and callously so.  Also, it shows us that the moral arguments around abortion often exist in direct relationship to larger ideas about economics and who has the right to a woman’s body.

If you do take the time to understand the intertwined history of abortion and slavery, it becomes painfully difficult to assert that abortion is wrong.  Because then you must defend the slaveholder who wanted the enslaved woman to birth that child so that he could enslave them both (even as he probably used religion and morality, rather than economics and labor, as his excuse and defense for why one shouldn’t turn to abortion).  Who is willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborts her fetus because she doesn’t want that child to be a slave?  Who is willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborts her fetus because she physically cannot bear the burden of labor and pregnancy?  Who is willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborts her fetus as a punishment to the man who rapes her, barely feeds her, barely clothes her, denies her religion, denies her liberty, and whips her when she works too slowly, makes a mistake, or attempts to flee?  Who is willing to fault the woman who aborts her fetus to protect her life and to save the evils of her life from those of her child?  To include the history of the enslaved WOMAN in the history of slavery and THEN compare that history to abortion is not easy.

By equating slavery and abortion in this way erases the enslaved woman from that past, from her own history.  I think if anything, this may be the most powerful message.

In today’s debate about abortion, women not part of the narrative.  RedState has declared us “locations”.  We are described only as wombs, vessels for the children that are to be.  Our jobs as mothers are not considered.  In fact, if anything, single mothers are painted as part of the problem in today’s society, even as our society decides more and more to not help them, to turn a blind eye to their struggles.  The realities of our lives – sexual, economic, emotional, etc. – are glossed over as unimportant in the larger discussion of whether fetuses should be forcefully carried to term even when women think or know it is better that they are not.  The problem is not that women have abortions, it is that women are not even considered.  They are not agents in the anti-choice rhetoric except as either “locations” or murderers.  They are either inhumane vessels or inhumane killers.  As Leanne at Blue Wave News has written:

I don’t see anyone declaring that attempts to control a woman’s reproductive choices – her reproductive freedom – is akin to slavery. No, somehow, in the minds of the anti-choice crowd, granting the woman autonomy over her own life and body is more like slavery for a fetus than is forcing that woman to undergo an unwanted pregnancy, to deliver an unwanted baby, and to deal with the subsequent changes to her body for the rest of her life. Ending an unwanted pregnancy is supposedly slavery, while requiring a woman to carry an unwanted fetus to term is not.

Everybody is more worried about the fetus, which is at best a potential human being, than they are about the woman, who is a fully-realized and viable human being already.

The struggle for pro-choice advocates is to reinsert the woman into the narrative, which is a struggle when you are battling opponents who refuse to see women in the past as much as in the present.