Wow. Going back to Ep1 - I’m reading this article on reproductive justice at the moment:
nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/09/dorothy-roberts-tried-to-warn-us.html?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social_acct&utm_content=nym&utm_term=curalate_like2buy_8ulK2dIq__3335377e-e430-42bd-8938-e2547cb17327
and this passage leapt out:
In 1987, Roberts read about the Angela Carder case. A working-class white woman in Maryland, Carder had struggled with cancer for most of her life. At 27 years old and 26 weeks pregnant, she lay intubated and sedated at George Washington University Medical Center, which went to court on behalf of Carder’s fetus. They wanted emergency permission to perform a Cesarean that Carder’s parents said their daughter wouldn’t have wanted; later, Carder, drifting in and out of consciousness, gave conflicting answers about her desires. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the surgery: “The court is of the view that the fetus should be given the opportunity to live.” The baby lived less than two hours; Carder died after two days.
To Roberts, still at the firm, it was a turning point. “When I read that, I thought, My goodness, if you’re pregnant, they can kill you,’” Roberts tells me. “I swear, I said, “I have to work on this.” Carder, Roberts understood, had lost the rights to her own body simply by being pregnant. “I also had the sense,” Roberts adds, “that if they would do that to her, what would they do to a Black woman?”
Going to finish reading the article …