Disobey

'With Partus sequitur ventrem—a 17th-century legal innovation—determined that children inherited the status of their mothers. Enslavers (a.k.a. hostage-takers), physicians, and politicians used this legal advantage and aligned their white supremacist aims to control and surveil Black enslaved peoples' bodies thoroughly. The enslaved womb was a precious resource that could create and nourish endless capital while powering a paternalistic medical industry that was newly emerging in the antebellum South. The white supremacist triangulation between the plantation economy, the state, and the healthcare industry was tied to enslaved Black women's profitability in bearing children. Black women were distinctly aware of their location in the plantation economy. And with this awareness, they often deployed surreptitious methods to affirm their reproductive autonomy and resist the dominance of their enslavers and the doctors who stood to profit through the harm infected on Black women's bodies. This reproductive resistance would become the basis of a particular political identity that regarded reproductive autonomy as an interconnected matter of justice, social belonging, and communal health. We now understand this brilliant intersectional analysis as Reproductive Justice, which Reproductive Justice Collective SisterSong defines "as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities."' https://scalawagmagazine.org/2025/02/reproductive-resistance-in-the-antebellum-south/