Enslaved women transmitted abortion knowledge deliberately to refuse birthing children into bondage.

Evidence

Their spewing vertical rods have poked us raw, back and front, behind the barn. Mornings, we are tied, hanging from oak trees by our lion arms while they spread their vertical seed inside our hearths. We refuse the birth of any new world, blue-eyed, enslaved Other. Before we are sold again we pass on, to the girls coming, how not to barren themselves from each other, how to angle far enough away, as far as any un-ownable woman can, become a kernel of late August corn inside of this dark cave, as far away as any un-free woman might be able to live, above the vertical death they have now inked into their country with our defying blood. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 182

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the historical fertility politics of slavery — how refusal to reproduce functioned as a survival strategy its own community safeguarded and passed on.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘foundational vs deviation’ frame — the poem treats enslavers’ pro-natalist laws as infrastructure of the regime.