Planters paid enslaved women to bear children and punished them for aborting

Evidence

Enslaved women confronted particular challenges on the plantations: they were responsible for both production and reproduction. Excluded from the most prestigious occupations—drivers, sugarboilers, and artisans—most of them worked in the fields. Those who worked as domestics were in particular danger of rape and other forms of abuse by their masters. And those who were mothers faced particularly wrenching and difficult struggles and choices. 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. In the late 1790s legends circulated about a midwife named Samedi who during the time of slavery took advantage of her profession to kill the children she delivered. She wore a belt with seventy knots, each a reminder of one of her victims, for whom, she proclaimed, she had been a “liberator.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 172

Categorization

• XREF: The Gallifet plantation and monetized reproductive incentives connect to the broader Atlantic slavery economy themes in A Midwife’s Tale and the concept of reproduction being exploited as production.
• SHARE: The midwife Samedi with her belt of seventy knots — a counter-narrative of enslaved women resisting through infanticide — would interest anyone working on histories of enslaved resistance.