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Black women undergo abortions as a form of resistance to slavery in the South.

1856

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ABOR

Ross (1992) writes: "In an 1856 essay, Dr. E.M. Pendleton claimed that planters regularly complained of whole families of women who failed to have children. Pendleton believed that 'blacks are possessed of a secret by which they destroy the foetus at an early age of gestation.' A Tennessee physician, Dr. John H. Morgan, said that he was certain that "slave" women were aborting either by 'medicine, violent exercise, or by external and internal manipulations.'" Many Black women use herbal abortion methods as well.