Pam’s Reviews > Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty > Status Update

Locking up astronomical numbers of black men and women is a powerful way of restricting reproductive Liberty and transferring political inequality to the next generation.

According to the CDC, Black women account for 36% of abortions in the US although blacks comprise less than 13% of the national population. Because they are disproportionately cash poor and face a host of structural barriers to accessing reproductive health services are more likely to be deterred by restrictive abortion laws and risk injury and death as a result both from unsafe pregnancies and unsafe abortions

Since 1973 when Roe v Wade, more than 700 women have been arrested detained or subjected to force medical interventions because of pregnancy related accusations. African American women in particular were significantly more likely to be reported by hospital staff arrested and charged with crimes. The 2001 conviction of Regina McKnight paved way for prosecuting women who suffered a miscarriage or stillbirth.

Medical researchers have definitively discredited this myth of the crack baby: the baby's exposed to crack cocaine and utero during this era grew up and we're not the monsters the media predicted. The negative outcomes they exhibited as newborns, originally attributed to crack, actually resulted from structural inequities experienced by black children