Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts

Roberts also describes the prosecution of drug usage among pregnant mothers under the crime of drug trafficking to a minor-their fetus. Johnson disproportionately affected black single mothers, who had higher rates of poverty. She argues that the War on Poverty initiated by Lyndon B. She documents the court-ordered implantation of Norplant by doctors and healthcare organizations into black women living in urban areas. In a similar case, Roberts describes Norplant, a Levonorgestrel-releasing implant used for birth control.

Hysterectomies of black women which served no medical purpose, but sterilized the women, continued into the 1970s. Such efforts were aided by anti-miscegenation laws that criminalized interracial marriage or intercourse.

Women's movements for contraception were supported by eugenicists who used contraception to decrease birth rates amongst the black and Latina population in the South. Roberts also details the alliance between Margaret Sanger, an early American birth control advocate, and the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, in order to illustrate how the rhetoric around contraceptives shifted from reproductive freedom to limiting the fertility of poor women of color. Cooper, who was born a slave and became an academic and an activist. Female slaves were often brought from Africa to America for breeding, where their white male owners would rape them and sell their children for profit. Roberts argues that institutional violence against black women and their reproductive autonomy in modern America has been present since slavery began in America. In 1998, Vintage Publishing released the paperback of Killing the Black Body. Killing the Black Body was published in hardcover on 9 October 1997 by Pantheon Books. Dorothy Roberts wrote Killing the Black Body during her time as a law professor at Rutgers University, where she studied issues of gender, race, and class.

Killing the Black Body by Dorothy Roberts