C-Section and Racism: “Cutting” to the Heart of the Issue for Black Women and Families

I use wombed-one to refer to my recognition of having been born with the special physical capacity to (1) carry and nurture life in the image of me and my people and (2) exercise the creative power necessary to sustain and enrich the living experiences of all things in and of the universe that my womb exists in. The terminology of wombed-one/womban came to mind shortly after the birth of my first child, a wombed-one herself. I had never heard the term used before, however, later found that the term of “womban” had been exercised in similar intent by at least one author (Muhungi 2011). My conception is in line with Muhungi’s (2011) definition of womban, though our supporting narratives and creative energies differ. I use wombed-ones and womban/womben interchangeably as biopsychosocial terms in affirmation of all wombed-ones and all life supported by them.

The life stories of Mary Turner, Saartjie Baartman, and some 130,000 Ethiopian wombed-ones in modern-day Israel illustrate the continuing history of physical violence against Black wombed-ones to extend racism and oppression of Black communities. Mary Turner was lynched in 1918 at 33 years old in infamously White supremacist Lowndes County, Georgia, after having her unborn child forcibly cut from her womb and stomach while being hung upside down. Her newborn child was then stomped to death. Saartjie Baartman, often referred to as Sara Bartman, is now well-known for being exhibited across Europe essentially as a circus act of human anomaly for her beautifully African physical attributions. Of the Ethiopian women mentioned, at least 130,000 were forcibly sterilized with birth control hormones by the supremacist Israeli government in the current twenty-first century. See Armstrong (2011), Chinn (2003), Knutsen (2013), and Thomson (2005).

Remarkably, an electronic database search shows that there have been no publications to date in the leading Africana social science outlets, such as the Journal of Black Studies, the Black Scholar, and the Journal of Black Psychology discussing C-sections among Black women.

A European identified as Flinders Petrie gave the name “Kahun” to this important document in 1889, which it is commonly called today. The ancient Africans of reference who resided in the location from which it was unearthed has been translated as Lehun (or Lahun) and is therefore the name that is used here to describe it. See Smith (2011).

Balayla (2010) explains that physicians in Kemet were called “swnw”, pronounced as sounou.

Canadian sources conspicuously excludes ethnically disaggregated data on birth methods, but consistently rates the provinces with the highest African populations as the highest C-section areas and indicates African womben as rating high in many of the so-called risk categories for C-section.