Enslaved women used escape, feigned illness, abortifacients, and childrearing to claim reproductive autonomy.

Evidence

Like Jannie Ligons, who reported Holtzclaw’s assault to the police in the twenty-first century, and Celia, who fought back against her enslaver’s sexual assaults in the nineteenth, Black women have long resisted domination of their bodies. Despite the law’s denial of their humanity, enslaved women devised numerous ways to claim some control over their lives. They escaped from enslavers, endured severe punishments, pretended to be sick, used abortifacients, and cared for their children in order to hold on to as much sexual and reproductive autonomy as possible. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 235