A professor gave a talk on the complicated history of reproductive justice in the United States at the University of Connecticut on Tuesday, March 11.
Understanding the past is a vital skill involved with making social progress, though it takes effort. Professor Deirdre Cooper Owens presented her knowledge on the changes in reproductive practices through time, as well as the correlation between the exploitation of women and race, which she has spent over a decade researching.
“Understand that science is guided by human beings,” said Owens.
The past of women and birthing people’s reproductive health dates back beyond “the father of modern gynecology,” James Marion Sims, explained Owens. Medical racism was prevalent prior to Sims’ mutilation of enslaved women’s bodies. However, the first step to learning about these issues is understanding the definitions of the topic at hand, according to Owens.
While reproductive health is a medical term, Owens said that reproductive rights evoke a more political meaning. She defines reproductive justice as directly linked to black women and the right for women and birthing people to control all aspects of their reproduction, including their ways of raising children.
Owens pointed out modern discrepancies of birth outcomes between white and black women. The facts tend to prove that black women suffer many more birth-related complications than their white counterparts. Owens’ provided statistics that show that the differences are simply based on race, not class or other factors, as black women with doctoral degrees suffer the most birth-related complications out of the group.
“Nothing protects you,” said Owens.
Doctors in early America, such as Samuel Cartwright, conducted medical experiments to back up their racist ideology. Medical research to point out false differences between races was based on victim blaming and fallacy, explained Owens.
Owens does not like to examine figures, like Sims, for their “exceptionality,” or viewing them as one evil person, but rather the product of an unjust system. She shared that Sims did not operate on black women to intentionally dissemble their bodies, but rather “leased” them from others to “fix” them and ensure that they could continue breeding. At the time, people were interested in doing what they could to ensure the producers of slave labor (bBlack women) could continue doing so, Owens said.
Lucy, Betsey and Anarcha, are the only patients of Sims whose names can be found today. There is a lineage between slavery and the advancement of modern gynecology, since doctors had complete access to these women’s bodies, Owens explained.
However, this legacy lives on. Doctors today still use many of the same methods that were used by Sims and other doctors. Owens shared that ear, nose and throat doctors receive far more surgical training than OBGYNs. Medical racism still exists, as pointed out by a study conducted by Kelly Hoffman in 2016, with medical providers anonymously reporting that they believe bBlack people experience pain less than white people do. All of these factors, along with the past contribute to bBlack women being statistically found by the CDC as 3-4 more times likely to suffer birth complications than white women in the United States, as Owens pointed out.
But there are many people willing to contribute to change. Artist and activist, Michelle Browder, who is a dear friend to Owens, bought the old hospital where Sims brutally operated on enslaved women, and she plans to open a museum and health-care center, called the “Mothers of Gynecology Health and Wellness Clinic.”
People can help “to be able to just have conversations where you can educate people. [If] you say it enough, you can at least know what it is. You can show a press this kind of work is important,” Owens said.