Sublime

Louisa May Alcott. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sarah Orne Jewett. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first Black woman doctor in America, who started her practice to provide medical care to freed slaves after the Civil War.

Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans,

the end, regardless of a Black woman’s marriage status or the specific circumstances surrounding her pregnancy, they were vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence at the hands of racist white doctors and complicit hospital workers who deemed impoverished Black women “unfit” for reproduction.

40 percent were women of color—most of whom were African American.70 During the Jim Crow era, impoverished Black women in the Deep South were frequently subjected to hysterectomies or tubal ligations against their will and without their knowledge.