Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Dorothy Roberts is an American legal scholar who lectures widely on reproductive rights. Sometime in the early to mid-nineties, she participated in a forum at a church entitled “Civil Rights Under Attack: Recent Supreme Court Decisions.” In her speech, she described how the court’s recent decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which “denied women a right to abortion in publicly funded hospitals,” had weakened Roe v. Wade and hurt Black women. A Black man in the audience called reproductive concerns a “white woman’s issue” and encouraged her to stick to “traditional civil rights concerns, such as affirmative action, voting rights, and criminal justice” (10). The comment prompted Roberts to author Killing the Black Body to show how Black women’s reproductive rights are inextricable from a legacy of racism. In addition, Roberts sought to “convince readers to think about reproduction in a new way” (11). Although much of Killing the Black Body is an objective sociological text, Roberts often injects her own voice into the narrative, editorializing and prompting reconsideration of conventional ideas about reproduction promoted by liberals and conservatives as well as figures from the Civil Rights Movement.