What to the Black Reproductive Laborer is Your Fourth of July?
- Jasmine Getrouw, Ph.D.
- Jul 4
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 8
Reimagining Douglass's Query
Every year, cultural historians, academicians and media commemorate the breadth and depth of the United States’ birth with speeches such as Frederick Douglass’ July 5, 1852 keynote to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. In it, he asks "What to the slave is your fourth of July?" (1). This powerful question compels the audience's awareness to the limitations of his personhood in this country. Douglass admonishes, “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us” ( n.d.). Douglass’s admonishment requires the audience to face the sharp cruelty of an intentionally discarded group, the laborers who made, shaped, and sustained the colonies that became The United States of America. However, we are not examining ALL of the laborers who bore fruit for this country. We must deepen our commemorations, starting today, on this 250th anniversary of the United States of America. To address this historical erasure, RJ Squared reframes the question as follows, What to the Black reproductive laborer is your 4th of July? This essay seeks to (re)member the exploitation of Black bodies commodified as productive technologies. They were forced to cultivate goods for the market and, most crucially, to give birth to human children who were instantly reduced to currency.
Too often, collapsing gender eliminates the unique experiences of Black reproductive labor. Black reproductive people, particularly women, were not explicitly situated in Douglass’s query. This new inquiry deliberately centers the wombs of Black laborers, acknowledging their distinct experiences within the founding of this nation, nestled inside a 500-year-old Western European settler-colonial project that historically demanded human separatism, erasure, and violence for its survival.
We intentionally use the term "reproductive laborer" rather than "those giving birth" to capture the full scope of this exploitation. First, it acknowledges that reproductive labor transcends the gender binary. Second, it recognizes that chattel slavery weaponized all reproductive biology. Beyond harvesting agricultural crops, this system demanded the forced cultivation of human beings as commodities. While history often fixates on the wombs that carried life, the term "reproductive laborer" exposes a broader, brutal reality: this economic engine forced the participation of every sex and every gender to harvest its human capital.
Reproductive Larceny and Bodily Commodification
Central to this historical memory is "Reproductive Larceny," (2) a term conceptualized by RJ Squared to define how Black, Indigenous, and marginalized reproductive bodies were policed, commodified, and systematically exploited to construct global economic systems.
This exploitation relied on what scholars Hortense Spillers (3) and Saidiya Hartman (4) identify as the fungibility of the Black body: reducing Black women to "ungendered captive flesh,"abstract, replaceable vessels for institutional violence. Nowhere is this more devastatingly clear than in the foundational history of American Obstetrics and Gynecology. The entire discipline was built upon the bodies of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, the Mothers of Gynecology.
These three enslaved women were subjected to agonizing experimental surgeries by Dr. J. Marion Sims. Operating entirely without anesthesia, Sims forced these terrorized women to hold one another down, weaponizing their enslaved status to make them complicit as unwilling "nurses" in their own torture. To ensure compliance, he administered morphine—not to heal, but to induce a passive, drug-induced state that mimicked consent while safeguarding his self-proclaimed path to medical fame (5). Treated with less humanity than animals, their bodies became training grounds where white physicians practiced with stainless steel speculums. The chronic, audible torture of their screams was so severe that some attending doctors fled the experimentation entirely. This violent erasure of informed consent is not an isolated historical footnote; it is the genesis of a continuous pattern of reproductive injustice that has traumatized Black women since captivity.
Enslaved Black women were subjected to an intentional cycle of forced breeding, conditional rewards, and systemic blame—coercive tactics engineered to artificially drive up fertility rates despite brutal living and working conditions that devastated maternal and infant health. A stark example of this manipulation comes from Mary Reynolds, a formerly enslaved woman, who recalled her owner promising an "outfitting of clothes for the twins and a double warm blanket" (5) to any woman on the plantation who gave birth. This transactional promise laid bare both a fundamental ignorance of reproductive biology and a severe scarcity of basic necessities, using essential material goods to manufacture a superficial form of consent.
This legacy of reproductive violation evolved over generations. In North Carolina, the state's eugenics program systematically subjected Black women to forced sterilization. Devoid of true informed consent, these women were coerced into permanent reproductive loss, a trauma that reverberates to modern Black women who carry the inherited memories of their grandmothers’ experiences within a medical system that refuses them shared decision-making.
Parallel to this physical coercion was the systemic erasure of Black medical expertise. Following the preventable deaths of an enslaved mother and her newborn under his supervision, Georgia practitioner Dr. John A. Wragg (1847) wrote in the Southern Journal of Medicine and Pharmacy: “Could, or rather would the life of this woman [and infant] have been saved had a physician been called in earlier?” Dr. Wragg’s defensive query arose only after he had actively dismissed and devalued the clinical assessment of the attending enslaved midwife. Crucially, this defensive historical rhetoric remains a prominent tool in contemporary medicine, continually weaponized to undermine and discredit Black birthing professionals today (5).
The Architecture of Surveillance: From Slavery to Eugenics
The policing of Black bodies did not die with the abolition of slavery; it mutated into new regimes of hegemonic surveillance, most notably through the state-sanctioned eugenics project. Following the end of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, American social policy pivoted toward forced sterilization to restrict the reproductive autonomy of marginalized people. Weaponized under laws like the 1873 Comstock Act, these pseudoscience-backed initiatives targeted African American, Native American, and Latina women—pioneering a blueprint of mass sterilization that later directly inspired Nazi Germany.
The physical toll of this framework is immortalized in the lived experiences of Black reproductive laborers, from Fannie Lou Hamer (6), who popularized the term Mississippi Appendectomy after being sterilized without her consent, to the devastating testimony of Elaine Riddick in the North Carolina sterilization trials. Reproductive larceny as surveillance straddles clinical boardrooms and mainstream political arenas. As Reproductive Justice activist, analyst, and practitioner Loretta Ross (7) notes, the conservative right strategically weaponized narratives of reproductive control during the 1960s "Southern Strategy." By deliberately swapping the overt language of eugenics for the moral framework of "pro-life" rhetoric, this maneuver effectively masked a calculated agenda designed to inflame racial and gender divisions while maintaining absolute state dominion over women's bodily autonomy.
The Physiological Toll: Weathering and Toxic Stress
The legacy of this structural racism is not merely historical; it manifests biologically. Structural racism is a living biological threat, not a relic of the past. It drives a severe public health crisis where Black women die at a rate of 55.3 per 100,000 live births, compared to just 19.1 for white women (8). Decades of research confirm that this gap is caused by racism, not genetic race.
The physiological toll of systemic racism weathers the body, causing it to prematurely age (9). Further, the biological impact of toxic stress (10) which locks the body into a permanent fight-or-flight response. Toxic stress alters brain chemistry, blocks oxygen-rich blood flow, damages the immune system, and fosters chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes. When pregnancy is compounded by these physiological burdens, the risk of maternal death spikes dramatically.
Data analyzed by The Century Foundation’s Black Maternal Health Federal Policy Collective (11) shows that while maternal mortality has decreased for every other demographic group, Black women have been left behind. The tragic losses of Kira Johnson (12) in 2016 and Dr. Janell Green Smith (13) in 2026 prove a devastating truth: middle-class security, high income, and excellent healthcare access cannot protect Black birthing people from systemic, preventable harm.
In this nation, the history of Black reproductive laborers is marked by documented, specific instances of "reproductive larceny." However, the reproductive justice movement equips us with the vital language, frameworks, and strategies passed down from our foremothers. These tools do more than just guide our pursuit of structural justice; they show us how to actively live in joy. Throughout this month, we invite you to join us as we break down the reproductive justice framework, demonstrating how it serves as the ultimate blueprint for building the equitable world we truly need.
References
RJ Squared. (2023). Reproductive larceny. https://www.rjsquared.org/reproductive-timeline timeline. https://www.rjsquared.org/reproductive-timeline
Spillers, H. (1988). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.
Hartman, S. V. (2022). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America (25th anniversary ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Owens, D. C., & Fett, S. M. (2019). Black Maternal and Infant Health: Historical Legacies of Slavery. American journal of public health, 109(10), 1342–1345. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2019.305243
Ross, L. J. (2017). Reproductive Justice as Intersectional Feminist Activism. Souls, 19(3), 286–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2017.1389634
Hoyert, D. L. (2025, February). Maternal mortality rates in the United States, 2023. National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2023/maternal-mortality-rates-2023.htm
Geronimus, A. T. (1992). The weathering hypothesis and the health of African-American women and infants: Evidence and speculations. Ethnicity & Disease, 2(3), 207–221.
Morsy, L., & Rothstein, R. (2019). Toxic dress and children’s outcomes: African American children growing up poor are at greater risk of disrupted physiological functioning and depressed academic achievement. Economic Policy Institute.
The Century Foundation’s Black Maternal Health Federal Policy Collective
4Kira4Moms. (2026). Kira's story: Why 4Kira4Moms exists. https://www.4kira4moms.com/our-story
Sy, S., & Merchant, A. (2026, January 15). Black midwife's death highlights racial gap in maternal mortality. PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/black-midwifes-death-highlights-racial-gap-in-maternal-mortality
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