What’s History and Culture Got To Do With It?

This blog post consists of portions from Chapter 6 of my book, which explores the history and impact of abortion on black women. It is a rather lengthy post, and it arose out of several discussions I had on social media regarding this difficult topic. It steps on the toes of folks on both sides of the aisle politically, but it is an issue that goes beyond politics. This is an issue that  penetrates to a woman’s soul and spirit.

Portions of Chapter 6 – What’s History and Culture Got To Do With It?

Tina Turner’s ballad, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” is a fitting introduction to the exploration of the subject of African-American women and abortion in America. Turner ends her chorus by saying, “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken.” For African-American women, broken hearts and reproduction intersect in an uneasy alliance. The study of black women and their reproduction is one that has historical and cultural roots that began during slavery. Emilie M. Townes states, 

Black women in the United States have, historically, endured a systematic, institutionalized denial of reproductive health services. From the slave master’s economic stake in black women’s fertility, to the racist connotations of early birth control policy, to sterilization abuse in the 1960s and 1970s, to the current campaign to inject Norplant and Depo-Provera in the arms of black teenage and welfare mothers, African American women have endured a nearly relentless onslaught on the reproductive capacities of our bodies.

The longstanding assault on the personhood of the black woman has had serious repercussions for her mental, physical, and spiritual health. Although it is said that reproductive health rights involves far more than abortion, this issue the lynchpin in the cultural “war” for women’s rights. Although Townes and other African-American female writers on the issue of women’s rights take a pro-choice stance, I would like to dissect their views further. A black woman’s “right” to abort her child because of poverty, health concerns, lack of support by the father and by her family, etc., paradoxically stems from choices made by her forbears during slavery. The responses of black women to the traumatic and systematic process of dehumanization generations ago are being played out daily in Black America today. Thus, I pose the question, in her fight for “reproductive freedom,” is the black woman truly free or does she continue to be shackled by a system that pits her rights against those of her unborn child?

… A study of the history of the black woman’s sojourn in America, highlights the importance of not only addressing her concerns in the public sphere, but also in the realm of pastoral care and ministry. In her book, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Historian Deborah Gray White describes the dehumanization endured by enslaved women. She claims, “African and African-American women were not born degraded but rendered so by enslavement.” She adds, 

More attention needs to be paid to the psychological costs of enslavement. As Nell Painter has argued, we need to ‘investigate’ the consequences of child abuse and sexual abuse on an entire society in which beating and raping of enslaved people was neither secret nor metaphorical. Given what we know today about abuse, the way it spawns feelings of anger, low self-esteem, depression, and even self-hatred, can we discuss black female survival without tackling the rage that dwelled within? 

The female slave was black in a white society, slave in a free society, and woman in a society ruled by men. 

Economics and prosperity for slave masters was tied up in the fertility of slave women. White states, “Once slaveholders realized that the reproductive function of the female slave could yield a profit, the manipulation of procreative sexual relations became an integral part of the sexual exploitation of female slaves.” Life for black women during slavery was brutal. White goes on to say, “They were the only women in America who were sexually exploited with impunity, stripped and whipped with a lash, and worked like oxen…only enslaved women were so totally unprotected by men or law. Only black women had their womanhood so totally denied.” In her literature review of Darlene Clark Hines article, “Female Slave Resistance: The economics of Sex,” Monique Moultrie discusses Hines’ examination of the types of resistance practiced by slave women in order to survive the harsh cruelties of slavery. Hines suggests three ways that these women resisted their sexual and economic oppression: 1) sexual abstinence; 2) abortion; and 3) infanticide. Moultrie states

The slave women’s refusal or avoidance of sex… (was) a method denying the slavocracy’s claim to the fruit of their wombs. Abortion was another technique used to deny slave masters economic gain from their sexually exploitative deeds… Perhaps the most damaging of the options of resistance was infanticide: mothers chose to kill their children as opposed to allowing them to endure the horrors of slavery. 

Slavery distorted motherhood, a role that was so valued by women in Africa. The harsh realities of slavery may have given rise to what Dorothy Roberts called maternal-fetal conflict. Maternal-fetal conflict is a term coined by feminists that describe the way that the law, social policies, and Medicine treat the pregnant woman’s interests as opposed to the interests of her unborn child. Roberts describes the issue facing the black mother, “The slave mother’s act of bearing a child profited the system that subjugated her.” The master did whatever he needed to do to protect the fetus, thus the complex interplay that was created in the relationship between a mother and her unborn child. Former slave, Lizzie Williams recounted the beating of slave women. “Dey,[the white folks] would dig a hole in de ground just big ‘nuff fo’ her stomach, make her lie face down and whip her on de back to keep from hurting the child.” The slave population grew despite the horrors of slavery, but the infant mortality rate was high. This may have been due to the poor health of mothers and their children, but there may also have been another contributing factor as well. 

According to White, there are a number of accounts of women who were accused of murdering their children. One killed her child because she claimed that her mistress was cruel to her child because the master had fathered the child. Another, because she knew of her master’s plan to sell her child. And then there is the story of Margaret Garner, the subject of the “longest, most expensive and dramatic fugitive slave trial in United States history.” Margaret, was a twenty-two year old Kentucky slave who, along with her husband, Robert, and several other family members, escaped from Maplewood and a neighboring plantation during the winter of 1856.  The family was subsequently tracked down by Margaret’s owner, Archibald Gaines. “Thinking that all was lost, Margaret seized a butcher knife and nearly decapitated her two-year old daughter, Mary. She was turning on her other three children when slave catchers burst in and subdued her.” It is believed that Margaret Garner tried to kill her children rather than see them returned to slavery. The sensational trial that followed garnered much publicity. Steven Weisenburger writes of the historical case, “The ensuing public opinion battle raged for months, as Margaret Garner’s story was told in churches and rented theaters by sympathetic preachers and outraged abolitionists.” Weisenburger goes on to say, “To them, no case more incisively revealed the pathology of slavery, and no deeds better symbolized the slave’s tragic heroism.” Weisenburger continues, “In that decade, however, no antebellum fugitive case achieved the signal importance of Margaret Garner’s.” He continues, “Margaret Garner’s translation into myth marked the beginning of a long amnesia. After Reconstruction and until 1987 she all but vanished from American cultural memory.” Weisenburger sums it up by saying, “Margaret Garner’s infanticide spotlighted the plight of women slaves and symbolized slavery’s awful, violent power over and within slave families.”

In 1988, Toni Morrison published the book, Beloved, which is loosely based on Garner’s story. Was this Morrison’s attempt to resurrect a crucial aspect of our collective narrative? In Beloved, the narrator, Denver, speaks about the death of her sister, Beloved.

 I love my mother but I know she killed one of her own daughters, and as tender as she is with me, I’m scared of her because of it. She missed killing my brothers and they knew it… And there sure is something in her that makes it alright to kill her own. I’m afraid that the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know who it is, but maybe there is something else terrible enough to make her do it again. 

Did slavery “breed” into women impacted by it, a detachment between mother and child that was protective of the psyche?  A type of defense mechanism that helped them survive the harsh realities that one’s child could be sold away from them on the whim of a capricious master? And, were their children aware? These questions are beyond the scope of this book, but they raise troubling questions for future inquiry.

Abstinence, abortion and infanticide, tools of female slave resistance, were a part of the secret lives of slave women, and “slave women understood the value of silence and secrecy.” To summarize the horror of this secrecy, White states, 

The inability of slave owners to penetrate the private world of female slaves is probably what kept them from learning of many abortions. The secrets of 

A midwife named Mollie became too much for her to bear. When she 

embraced Christianity, it was the first thing for which she asked forgiveness. She said, “I was carried to the gates of hell… my life as a midwife was shown to me and I have certainly felt sorry for all the things I did…”

The secret lives of slave women occasionally erupted in publicized expressions of infanticide. But most of the cases of abortion and child murder happened, “literally under cover of darkness.” These acts were most often quietly passed down from generation to generation, in response to the horrors slavery. Slave babies were born into environments of extreme deprivation, malnutrition, and disease, but there remain significant questions about the numbers of children dying under mysterious circumstances. The female slave lived a life of ambivalence and resilience. She was haunted by her African past that elevated her status because she was a mother, and traumatized by her present that caused her at times to destroy the very thing that gave her such a sense of profound self-worth. The secrets of the black woman helped to sustain her in unspeakable circumstances, but they also helped to deeply wound her soul.

After the Civil War, the black woman was free from chains, yet she was now confronted with an oppressive system of extreme poverty. In addition to the overarching system of racism and sexism, she and her family now faced a future that seemed even more hopeless than slavery itself. These African Americans who had endured both the physical and psychological trauma of slavery, were now “free.” They had no time to heal from the wounds of slavery before facing terrorists such as the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups, and an uncertain future. They had few skills and no education, and yet they were charged with caring for themselves and their families. 

During the Harlem Renaissance, several writers wrote about this sense of hopelessness. The angst regarding whether to bring children into the world, rearing them in a culture that devalued them and consigned them to lead lives of destitution and extreme hardship was real. Nella Larsen, was one such author. In her book, Quicksand, she describes this anguish through her character, Helga. “Marriage, that means children to me. And why would I add more suffering to the world? Why add more unwanted, tortured Negroes to America?” 

  The harsh realities of post-Reconstruction life for the majority of African-Americans prompted them to establish institutions to strengthen the black family. Vincent Harding notes that in addition to the church; schools, newspapers, fraternal organizations, mutual aid societies, and others, were established to provide uplift to a people still reeling from the collective traumas of slavery. These institutions “were only a portion of the internal, self-claiming, self-defining work that was constantly re-creating the black community.” Harding goes on to note a paradox regarding African-American self-help efforts. He states, “In a country almost 90% white, permeated by conscious and unconscious white supremacist beliefs and social Darwinist assumptions, black people needed dedicated white allies in the struggle for justice… 

  Thus, when eugenicists, disguised as willing allies, offered assistance to the struggling black community, promoting the limitation of family size as a means out of destitution and poverty, many quickly signed on. As Dorothy Roberts recounts,

Race completely changes the significance of birth control to the story of women’s reproductive freedom. For privileged white women in America, birth control has been an emblem of reproductive liberty. Organizations such as Planned Parent-hood have long championed birth control as a key to women’s liberation from compulsory motherhood and gender stereo-types. But the movement to expand women’s reproductive options was marked by racism from its very inception in the early part of this (20th) century.” 

Many leaders in the African-American community enthusiastically endorsed birth control as a means to escape poverty. Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League established the Negro Advisory Council, comprised of distinguished African-Americans such as Dr. W.E.B. Dubois, Mary McCleod Bethune, Professor E. Franklin Frazier, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell and others. These leaders became the mouthpiece of the birth control movement to the black community. It is interesting to note that many of their writings are filled with eugenicist rhetoric. As the elite of Black America, they cautioned against the unbridled reproduction of poor blacks. W.E.B. Dubois, in the June 1932 edition of the Birth Control Review, writes, 

The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit… 

The eugenics movement is believed to have its origins in the writings of Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton was profoundly influenced by Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, the book that described his theory of evolution. Interestingly, the original title of this influential book is, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Eugenics, meaning “good in birth,” was a “science” that was formulated based on the premise that society could be improved by “encouraging the procreation of people of superior stock.” Roberts goes on to say that Sanger and her fellow eugenicists whole- heartedly embraced Galton’s ideas about race and heritability. She states, “The eugenicists advocated the rational control of reproduction in order to improve society.” Eugenicists opposed any legislation or social programs to assist the poor. “They argued that adequate medical care, better working conditions, and minimum wages all harmed society because those measures enabled people with inferior heredity to live longer and produce more children.” 

Lest we think that the eugenics movement was a popular fad of another era, which has no bearing upon women’s reproductive justice today, Roberts gives us a caution. She explains that the theories promulgated by the eugenicists of the early 20th century helped to “shape our understanding of reproduction and permeates the promotion of contemporary policies that regulate black women’s childbearing” today. 

Sanger and her cohorts cleverly promoted birth control as “an aspect of public health” which “improved the national welfare.” In 1939, the newly formed Birth Control Federation of America was established, and Margaret Sanger served as honorary chairperson of the board. In a letter written by Sanger to Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune, her racist views were quite evident. She was arguing to Gamble that black leaders should be used to promulgate their birth control message. Sanger states,

It seems to me from my experience… in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table, which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubts. They do not do this with the white people, and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, for which I believe, will have far reaching results among the colored people… 

Sanger goes on to write about the influence of the black pastor, who, like black doctors and nurses, were really pawns in their sinister plan to decrease the black population, especially the poor.

The minister’s work is also important, and he also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation, as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to eliminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.   

 The Negro Project was born in 1939 with two pilot projects, one in Nashville, Tennessee, and the other in rural counties of South Carolina. Both projects used black nurses to disseminate birth control information. The Birth Control Federation of America did not allow blacks to take the lead in overseeing and developing the programs, it “remained firmly in control of the project’s policies.” In fact, Gamble commented in a memo during the project, “ There is great danger that we will fail because the Negroes think it a plan for extermination.” 

The birth control movement gradually evolved into the movement for abortion rights. Again this “solution” was promulgated as a means to help the poor, especially African-Americans. And as a result, abortion has impacted the black community in genocidal proportions. Black women have chosen this option for unplanned pregnancies far more readily than any other group. A black woman is more than twice as likely as a Latino woman and almost five times more likely than a white woman to have an abortion.Was this ambivalence toward motherhood a consequence of the black woman’s experience during slavery and her acculturation in this country? Because of the crushing oppression and trauma, abortion and infanticide, which began as resistance to slavery, began to be passed down from generation to generation. 

Social scientist, Dr. Joy DeGruy, describes certain trans-generational adaptations associated with the past traumas of slavery and ongoing oppression as Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. She goes on to state, “Traumas can upset our equilibrium and sense of wellbeing. If a trauma is severe enough it can distort our attitudes and beliefs. Such distortions often result in dysfunctional behaviors, which can in turn produce unwanted consequences.”

Abortion is not specifically mentioned by Degruy in her book, but I posit its frequent use by African-American women as a solution to the problem of an unplanned pregnancy is a result of communal and societal adaptation. Shelly Rambo concurs with Degruy when she explains, “Trauma does not go away. It persists in symptoms that live on in the body, in the intrusive fragments of memories that return. It persists in symptoms that live on in communities, in layers of past violence that constitute present ways of relating.”  

Nataniel Vincent Mohatt, et al, states, “Historical trauma refers to a complex and collective trauma experienced over time and across generations by a group of people

who share an identity, affiliation, or circumstance.” Mohatt and his research team go on to say that the term historical trauma was initially used to describe the life experience and psychological responses of the children of Holocaust survivors. Historical trauma can be understood as consisting of the following primary elements. A trauma or wounding is shared by a group of people; and the impact of that trauma spans multiple generations such that contemporary members of the affected group may experience trauma-related symptoms without having been present for the past traumatizing event(s).

In the case of African Americans, chattel slavery no longer exists in this country, but the nation is still grappling with the issue of race. The state of Black America in the health care, economic, educational, and criminal justice systems reveal that race continues to play a significant role in the culture of America. The Black Lives Matter movement may be the result of African American youth expressing a deep-seated anxiety that the current highly publicized police shootings of young black males may represent a modern-day form of lynching. The increased numbers of shootings of young black men by other young black men may also be the result of the sequelae of historical trauma.

Studies of the first-generation survivors of Holocaust victims, revealed that they are at increased risk for PTSD. Other studies found that second and third generation survivors revealed both an increased resilience and an increased risk for PTSD. Wounded communities display both resilience and the effects of traumatic stress.  And now that historical is increasingly being studied, researchers are recognizing the complexities of the psychological and behavioral manifestations of these communities. Ironically, the initial studies were on the Jews, who were traumatized by the Holocaust, yet in this country the impact of the collective traumas inflicted on First Nations peoples and African-Americans for generations was ignored. The descendants of slaves and Native Americans were blamed for their transgenerational pathologies, as they were considered to logical consequences of genetically inferior peoples.

The American government now recognizes that historical trauma impacts generations in behavior and psychological self-concepts. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s GAINS Center For Behavioral Health and Justice Transformation reports that historical, trans-generational, or intergenerational trauma (all used interchangeably), may manifest itself in the following ways:

• Historical Unresolved Grief: Grief as the result of historical trauma that has not been adequately expressed, acknowledged, or otherwise resolved. Examples include Holocaust survivors; lack of acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide and the mass murder of other ethnic groups in World War II. 
• Disenfranchised Grief: Grief as the result of historical trauma when loss cannot be voiced publicly or that loss is not openly acknowledged by the public. For example, the lack of recognition of the generations of loss of American Indians from colonialism, disease and other factors, and the corresponding lack of recognition of their right to grieve these collective experiences. 
• Internalized Oppression: As the result of historical trauma, traumatized people may begin to internalize the views of the oppressor and perpetuate a cycle of self-hatred that manifests itself in negative behaviors. Emotions such as anger, hatred, and aggression are self-inflicted, as well as inflicted on members of one’s own group. For example, self-hatred among Blacks/African Americans who act out their aggression on people who look like them.

African-Americans manifest all of these components. As a people, they have been unable to fully grieve the traumas of chattel slavery. Their trauma and the associated losses that accompany it have not been adequately acknowledged by the larger, predominant culture. In fact, America is quite adept as a nation in blaming the victim for their negative pathology without acknowledging the role that racism and white privilege have played, and continue to play, in the centuries old traumatic experiences of people of African descent in this country. And finally, African-Americans, in many ways have internalized the oppressive views of the dominant culture. This is played out in the significant cultural and health issues that plague the black community. 

The concerns that plague the African-American are complex and multifaceted. There is not just one cause, and certainly not just one solution. It is important that, as a community, African-Americans not only shine a light on social structures that need changing, but also on ourselves. There is much strength and resilience in the black community, and there is also suffering. What do we need to do to deal with the transgenerational perpetuation of historical trauma in our own community? The solutions begin to materialize when we pause to examine the stories about our history that we have told, and the stories about our history that we have refused to examine, acknowledge, and then tell.

 All of these components have impacted the black woman, and I believe that she has carried these “ways of being in the world” into the everyday aspects of her life.  The black woman has not been allowed to grieve the traumas she suffered during slavery. She has not been afforded the time nor privilege to be vulnerable, even in church, and to begin the process of grieving. Stereotypes, economic necessity, and internalized oppression have prevented her from even recognizing her need for healing and care. These concerns have also prevented the larger culture from acknowledging the silent suffering of black women.

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1. Emilie M. Townes, “African American Churches and Reproductive Rights,” in The Public Influences of African American Churches, ed. R. Drew Smith, vol. 2, Long March Ahead: African American Churches and Public Policy in Post-Civil Rights America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 128.
2. Deborah G. White, Ar’n’t i a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 8- 9.
3. Monique Moultrie “Literature Review Darline Clark Hine Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Slavery,” Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, April 1, 2014, accessed April 1, 2014, http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/slavery/united-states/hines.html.
4. Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, vintage books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 40.
5. Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South, pbk. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 5.
6.   Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South, pbk. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 5.
7. Toni Morrison, Beloved: A Novel (New York: Plume, 1988), 205.
8. Jamie Hart, “Who Should Have the Children: Discussions of Birth Control Among African-American Intellectuals 1920- 1939”, Journal of Negro History 79, no. 1 (Winter, 1994): 71, accessed April 1,2014, http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2717668?uid=3739616&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103910770743.
9. “Prologue,” in The Eyes On the Prize Reader: Documents, Speeches, and First Hand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle 1954-1990, ed. Clayborne Carson et al. (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 9.
10. Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, vintage books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 56.
11.   Susan A. Cohen, “Abortion and Women of Color: The Bigger Picture”, Guttmacher Policy Review 11, no. 3: 1, accessed April 1, 2014, http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/11/3/gpr110302.html.
12. Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Portland, OR: Joy DeGruy Publications, 2005), 13.
13. Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, ©2010), 2.
14. Nathaniel Vincent Mohatt et al., “Review Historical Trauma as Public Narrative: A Conceptual Review of How history Impacts Present-Day Health,” Social Science and Medicine 106 (2014): 128-36, accessed September 10, 2016
15. “Fact Sheet: Historical,” SAMHSA’S Gains Center For Behavioral Health and Justice Transformation, accessed September 5, 2016, http://mha.ohio.gov/Portals/0/assets/Initiatives/TIC/General/Historical%20Trauma%20SAMHSAs%20Gains%20Center.pdf.