Questions of Violent Care and Radical Imagination: Enslaved Women and Reproductive Resistance in Eighteenth Century St. Domingue
Madelyn Kiernan
Simmons University
Abstract
In this paper, I look at how enslaved mothers took back power from planters in St. Domingue through measures of reproductive resistance, including abortion, infanticide, and marronage during pregnancy. Furthermore, I examine how the medical and spiritual practices of enslaved midwives were passed down through generations, focusing on the use of abortifacients. With regards to infanticide, I discuss the various methods, examples, and the resulting limitations placed upon enslaved midwives in practice, leading to a rise in white male physicians being viewed as the experts in obstetric care. I also examined the complexity of infanticide and how harmful colonial stereotypes of enslaved mothers as lazy and negligent blurred cultural perceptions of this phenomenon. Additionally, I investigated the unique position that enslaved midwives were in as respected members of the community to be able to complete these acts. With marronage, I focused on the experiences of enslaved mothers who specifically escaped plantations with the intentions of keeping their children out of bondage, and how these radical imaginings of liberation contributed to fervor for the ensuing Haitian Revolution. These forms of reproductive resistance allowed enslaved women in St. Domingue to regain agency by choosing to have children on their own terms, thus disrupting the continuation of forced reproduction by planters within chattel slavery.
