Partus sequitur ventrem made enslaved women’s children property to profit enslavers

Evidence

Innumerable legal efforts to strip Black people of their humanity existed to justify the extraction of profit. Beginning in the 1660s, white officials ensured that all children born to enslaved women would also be enslaved for life and would belong not to their mothers but to the white men who owned their mothers. These officials passed laws dictating that the child’s status would follow that of the mother, not the father, upending European norms and guaranteeing that the children of enslaved women who were raped or sexually coerced by white men would be born enslaved—not free, as they would be if their status followed their father’s. It meant that profit for white people could be made from Black women’s wombs. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1334

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how the legal principle that child status follows the mother was inverted from European norms specifically to generate profit from enslaved women’s wombs.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the readers’ ‘Grafting & Growth’ piece on how infrastructure (here, legal codes) is built to extract value — kinship law as a profit-extraction system.