Slavery: The Original Fight for Reproductive Control
- Anarcha, Betsy, Lucy and at least nine other unidentified enslaved women and girls worked together for Dr. James Marion Sims also known as the “Father of Gynecology.”
- Sims regularly performed forced surgeries, without anesthesia, on these enslaved women under the guise of science.
- This medical terrorism was used to justify racist assumptions about the Black women and their bodies. Followers of his work embraced notions that Black women had a higher tolerance for pain when receiving medical treatment, while ignoring that these women were forcibly restrained under threat of death for these procedures. Such stereotypes have informed contemporary medical racism.