Chadia MathurinYesterday, the United States Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. Many Caribbean activists who champion the decriminalization of abortion are understandably concerned with what this means for their cause in a region notorious for mimicking the soft politics of its Northern neighbors. They are concerned that it is a step back in a noteworthy fight that goes as far back as the days of the plantation.
These activists argue that the gubernatorial and economic structures which exist today are no different from that which existed during plantation economy. They go on further to bolster their argument with the proposition that just as women resisted the systems of plantation economy through abortion, they resist capitalism and patriarchy today through the same. Considering these arguments no doubt leads one back into time to understand the place of abortion within oppressive economic and social structures.
The first part of “The Resistance Series”, this essay will examine Abortion on the Plantation through analysis of the case of Catalina of Wemyss Plantation.
In many societies, including those from which the enslaved were plucked, the entrance of new life marks a point of immense celebration. It meant the extension of legacy. It meant blessing. For many women, it meant purpose fulfilled. Plantation life would convert and sod that experience for the enslaved, reducing the entrance of new life to merely an activity of economics. 1Before 1807 British Caribbean slave owners regarded buying slaves rather than breeding them as a necessary practice. Planters calculated the costs of purchasing adult and adolescent Africans as opposed to rearing children themselves and concluded that they would not encourage their seasoned women slaves to breed ‘as thereby so much work is lost in their attendance upon the infants’…After 1807, with the legal end of the British slave trade, the situation changed. There was now a necessity to keep up the stock of slaves by breeding. In fact, there was no longer an alternative”. – Morgan, K. (2006). Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, c.1776–1834. History, 91(2 (302)), 231–253. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24427835
For planters, the meaning of new life did not go beyond a stable and continued labour force for the demands of their plantations nor did it go beyond the possibility of income from the sale of a slave. It did not go beyond an added value to an investment, most times, already recouped. Enslaved women were well aware that their children would be subject to the prevailing order of the day: partus sequitir ventrem. At birth, just like their mothers, they would become the property of slave masters. They would, without exception be expected to endure a fate not dissimilar from those who bore them. Recognizing these things, enslaved women began also to regard the making of life as more than just a means of legacy. Some of them grew to place on it a political value.
The Stories of Abortion: Who Did It, Why They Did It and How They Did It
The problem of creating a self-reproducing slave population after the ending of the British Atlantic slave trade in 1807 meant that the fecundity of slave women became central to the viability of plantation slavery in the British Caribbean.
Kenneth Morgan 2https://www.jstor.org/stable/24427835
Fecundity had placed them in an unusual position and one not easily attained: power. The enslaved had very few traditional means of political power, but enslaved women understood that the plantocracy’s need for them to reproduce had changed the stakes of the game. They understood profoundly that control over their reproductivity – when and how they reproduced – would serve as an effective means by which they could discontinue the legacy of slavery. An abortion meant one less life added to the labour force. An abortion could also mean time off from the plantation to recuperate. All of these things meant frustrated financial progress for the planter and an added point for the resistance to slavery.
Whether the slave woman interrupted her pregnancies in her own personal interest or in order to frustrate the estate’s labour needs, the effect was the same, the proprietor was touched in his most vulnerable state. 3 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24427835
Mathurin-Muir (2014)
Some of these women were exceedingly clever in picking the times at which they would discontinue their pregnancies, further wounding the economic progress of the planter. You see, a pregnant woman could be removed from the field gang to be placed into the less strenuous second gang for the sake of safeguarding the new life being carried. This provided many with the doubled-edged sword of decreasing productivity for a period, and later inducing an abortion. 4“A second line of interpretation emphasizes the agency of slave women in resisting biological reproduction as a political statement against the system of slavery. This view focuses on strategies deployed to avoid pregnancy and acts undertaken to curtail pregnancies and unwanted births, such as abortion and infanticide. In this line of analysis, slave women assume the major role in determining the predisposition to pregnancy and the decisions then taken about babies over the nine month cycle and in the first weeks of life.” -MORGAN, K. (2006). Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, c.1776–1834. History, 91(2 (302)), 231–253. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24427835
Even in the face of these very logical proofs, writers like David Clover encourage those who seek to frame abortion as an act of resistance on the plantation to be cautious in their analysis. His reasons are valid. For one, there are very few specific accounts of women who committed the transgression of abortion on plantations. To further this argument, there are historians who purport that abortion on the plantation was a rare occurrence; that the frequency of abortion on Caribbean plantations was grossly exaggerated. Secondly, and even worse, the accounts which exist are not from the woman’s perspective, limiting a full and clear understanding of what truly persuaded the actions of these women. Nonetheless, what exists provides insight otherwise denied and captures effusively a position touted by Mathurin-Muir (2014); that even when terminations were not directly pointed toward disrupting plantation labour, it accomplished the same. This, it seems, rendered abortion on the plantation, for any purpose, an act of resistance toward slavery and inadvertently, the planter’s prosperity.
This is more than evident in the case of Catalina from Wemyss Estate.
The Who: Catalina from Wemyss Estate
On Monday May 3rd, 1824, a 35-year old enslaved woman, Catalina [legal name is believed to be Susanna Mathison] induced an abortion on the Wemyss plantation in St. James, Jamaica. Records show that she was married to one, William Polson, had lost an infant prior to the one she aborted and had another baby in 1825 post the induced abortion. One of the existing accounts define Catalina as coming from a “notoriously bad home” all though the premise – incredibly shaky – upon which such characterization was derived seems to be her family’s practice of obeah.
In his report chronicling Catalina’s abortion the overseer of Wemyss plantation wrote the following:
this women having been threatened (tho’ not punished) in the Field by the Driver during the course of her work for quarrelling with another woman made a complaint to me at the same time informed me she thought herself pregnant and could not work in great Gang in consequence of which I desired examined by the midwife who reported her as being so (her infant dying only six weeks previous to the examination of the Midwife) I put her into the second Gang for light employment, the doing so of which excited the curiosity of her fellow Negroes who ridiculed her as making a pretence (she having formerly been a deceiving character) to escape working in the Field. She threatened the Midwife that she would bring on herself an abortion (because the Negroes troubled her) two weeks previous to the facts taking place on May 3rd. She actually went to the Pastures and picked a herb called country Ebo which she boiled and drank consequently brought on the fact she so coldly premeditated, the Doctor of the Estate was applied to who directed me the confine her until Mr. P[hillips, the estates’ Attorney] arrived, which was done and upon Mr P. strictly examining the case caused her to be confined in the Dungeon for one month and kept on as much Bread and water only as she could consume as punishment which was attended to.
Castle Wemyss Estate Papers ICS/101/3/2/8
In “This horably wicked action”: abortion and resistance on a Jamaican slave plantation“, David Clover, highlights a letter to Mr. Halliday [plantation manager] from Mr. Phillips, the estate attorney. The attorney’s account, in several instances is markedly different from the report submitted by the plantation overseer. Mr. Phillips writes:
The only case of misconduct is of a woman called Catalina alias Susannah Mathison which is of too serious a nature to overlook, she belongs to a family notoriously bad having been one of those formerly practising Obeah this woman brought on abortion last month drinking profusely of Vervain and Contryerva, which she threatened to do in consequence of a disagreement with her husband, for this horably wicked act I have directed she should be punished with solitary confinement.
The Why: Varying Accounts & Multiple Reasons
Though they do not reveal clearly the prompt(s) for Catalina’s abortion, the discrepant accounts – one from the overseer and one from the attorney – reveal a number of things. Catalina seemed, at the time of her induced abortion, to be enduring a difficult period, both mentally and emotionally. She had lost a baby not long before her new pregnancy, she seemed to be at work without having had time to grieve sufficiently, a husband with whom she was quarreling [for reasons unknown] and she had the added burden of being subject to the bullying of her peers. All of these factors could provide or serve as impetus to a distraught woman to terminate life within, yet they were seemingly disregarded, and her actions were caricatured as merely a “horably wicked act”.
The aforementioned revelation leads to here: the second revelation. It concerns the myriad ways in which one woman’s decision to terminate life could be interpreted. The overseer had his own interpretation of Catalina’s actions, while the attorney had his own. While the two interpretations can co-exist, the elimination of Catalina’s voice leaves us with doubts as to the verity of the occurrence.
The third revelation, tied to the second, is that the plantation economy minimized the woman’s voice. Two accounts shared, and none of them reveal expressly – in her own words – what Catalina had to say about why she decided to induce an abortion.
All three of these revelations, especially the second, make it a point to heed Clover’s admonitions about how conversations surrounding the literature on resistance are shaped, even more so when it concerns the framing of abortion as an act of resistance. Nevertheless, both accounts and their ensuing revelations capture a response to plantation abortions which encapsulates Mathurin-Muir’s position: that no matter the reasons for an enslaved woman’s induction of abortion, her actions always seemed as deriving from a place and motive punitive to the progress of the plantocracy, and thus an act needing both to be castigated and deterred. Abortion was always seen as resistance.
The How: Botany and Obeah
Of all the details provided in the overseer and attorney’s claims, the only seeming speck of sameness from these dual accounts is the manner in which Catalina induced her abortion: through a boiled concoction of selected herbs. This is fairly significant primarily because it indicates that an enslaved, highly likely uneducated woman, had acquired a sufficient knowledge of herbs to induce a procedure otherwise left to medical professionals. The attorney, Mr. Phillips, also made it a matter of intention to characterize Catalina as coming from a family notorious for its practice of obeah. These linkages ought not to be overlooked. Attaching abortion to forbidden spiritual practice as well as forbidden and exclusive knowledge systems, as evident in the case of Catalina provides a worthy foundation for the framing of abortion as resistance. It suggests that abortion is a matter concerned with things forbidden, and by this virtue any engagement with the act is rendered an undertaking of resistance. Therefore, by virtue of its reliance on things forbidden, abortion on the plantation was always determined an act of resistance.
There is a widespread belief amongst intellectuals of optimistic persuasion that the study of history serves to look into our past so that we can shape the present in a manner that improves the future. The historical analysis of abortion on the plantations does not escape this philosophy.
The case of Catalina of Wemyss plantation can without effort be transported into the context of the 21st. century. True, today women are not constricted through enslavement. Notwithstanding, Caribbean women today endure significant hardships, their voices are often minimized in the squares that matter, they are often left with minimal support in the rearing of their offspring and yet they are being asked to have more children in remedy to declining birth rates. Like those who came before them, today, there are those who seek to resist oppressive economic and social structures – high taxes, few social safety nets, and legislature that marginalizes their progress and safety – through abortion. But there is hope that perhaps our attention to history can impress on us the need to shape our present in a manner that will leave our nations’ daughters without the economic and social structures which often beckon this act of resistance.
Akil Warner
wakonteafrica
Ruel Johnson
Chadia Mathurin
