Abortion and Black Women's Health Networks in South Carolina, 1940–70

Abstract

This article investigates criminal abortions in South Carolina from 1940 to 1970. This research reveals an increased regulation of Black women's bodies and heightened reporting on Black women's criminal offenses, especially abortion, from the 1940s through the 1960s. It also, however, demonstrates the intergenerational persistence of Black women's communally driven health practices, including abortion. It reveals Black women's understandings of the essential links between the past and the present: not only the persistent legacies of reproductive repression at the hands of medical and state authorities, but also women's connections with their enslaved ancestors, whose healthcare practices survived and even flourished through the mid-twentieth century in some areas.