While birth control is lauded as a symbol of reproductive freedom, historically, it has been used to regulate Black women’s bodies and usurp their reproductive rights. In this project, I seek to uncover: (1) how historic abuse of Black women’s reproductive capacities informs their distrust of healthcare systems and (2) how this distrust influences their birth control preferences. To do this, I intend to conduct a secondary historical analysis to examine how key historical cases (such as J. Marion Sims’ fistula experiments on enslaved women) laid the foundation for later assaults on Black women’s reproductive capacities. I then intend to use survey data to examine how these historical abuses led to their distrust and how this distrust influences their disparate birth control usage and preferences. This project is important because no research has systematically examined the relationship between historical assault on Black women and their resultant distrust and its manifestation through birth control preferences. Further, most research that explores Black people’s distrust of healthcare systems privilege the Black male experience and neglects Black women’s experiences. By particularizing the discussion of Black people’s distrust to Black women, this project interjects new dialogue into the discussion of Black people’s interactions with the medical establishment in a way that provides both a more holistic and nuanced view of the contemporary landscape.
