Planters had to pay enslaved women to bear children because birthrates were low

Evidence

During the second half of the eighteenth century, some planters became concerned about the low birthrates among the slaves and instituted incentive programs to encourage women to have children. The manager of the thriving Gallifet sugar plantations in the Northern Province gave monetary rewards to mothers—one for giving birth, and another, probably larger, for weaning the child two years later. Programs of encouragement were often accompanied by new and cruel forms of punishment for those accused of having had abortions. In the Southern Province some women suspected of having them were forced to wear a humanshaped figurine symbolizing the lost baby around their necks. Women who had had abortions were considered to have deprived their masters of a piece of human property. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 172

Categorization

• XREF: The abortion-as-property-crime logic parallels comparable readings of how reproduction was regulated in the concubinage and partus sequitur ventrem systems in other slave societies.