History Shakes. That’s the best way I can describe the near-jittery excitement that I get when I'm in a groove during a session or when I learn something that expands and shifts my perspective on something I’ve been familiar with for a long time. With the state of Alabama shrinking reproductive freedoms, I got a mean case of the History Shakes the other day thanks to the brilliant mind of a Black lady professor, Peggy Cooper Davis.
The short of it all is that there is an argument that reproductive rights are intrinsically tied to Black women having body autonomy through the abolition of slavery by the 13th Amendment.
Get ready because this session of History Shakes is a group trip, Magic School Bus style.
To put us on the same page, a cliff notes version of where we are. When the Supreme Court made the Dodds ruling overturning Roe, Justice Alito wrote for the Majority, saying in a nutshell that since abortion was not legal when the 1868 14th Amendment was ratified, it had “no basis in the Constitution’s text or in our Nation’s history…” thus isn’t a fundamental right.
The combined dissent by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan clapped back and emphasized how this decision specifically affected Black and Women of Color’s “status as free and equal citizens.
On the day of said discovery, I’d already stopped working for the evening, and while scrolling through Tiktok, up popped one of my favorite columnists and historical noodlers, Mr. Jamelle Bouie.
He was responding to a comment asking him to expand on a connection he stated between the 13th Amendment and the overturned Roe decision.
I immediately perked up, and for the next nine minutes, Mr. Bouie had my rapt attention as he explained that he was familiar with that connection, thanks to the legal mind of NYU Law School’s, Professor Peggy Cooper Davis.
And this is when the shakes started…
With the Dobbs case in the back of my mind, I learned how Professor Cooper Davis had been making the argument that the abolition of slavery could directly correlate to the reproductive freedom of Black women with a progressive interpretation of the 13th ability to abolish slavery and all it entails.
The American Domestic Slave Trade was born in earnest when Congress shut down the international (kidnapping) importation of Black bodies in 1808, creating the Second Middle Passage. With Eli Whitney’s cotton gin catapulting the crop to the status of “King Cotton,” more hands were needed to work the field.
I know, but I got to build the story…
Mr. Bouie explains how Professor Cooper expounds how the internal slave trade’s need to maintain and grow the free labor force, together with the country's expansion, propelled the value of childbearing enslaved women due to their ability to shift the economic wealth of a planter by bearing offspring. Legal bondage purposely offered no protections for Black women when it came to body autonomy in terms of family planning and reproductive freedom.
The first thing that came to mind was the 1855 case The State of Missouri v. Celia, A Slave. A teenage enslaved girl named Celia was executed for the death of Robert Newsom, who held her in bondage. She retaliated, taking his life for the repeated assault that resulted in the birth of two children and the pregnancy of a third by Newsom.
With that in mind, Professor Cooper Davis stipulates that the 13th Amendment's abolition of legal slavery means the removal of all aspects of the “peculiar institution,” meaning returning body autonomy to Black women.
Okay, I’m winding down…
So, when looking at the ban on abortion, Professor Cooper Davis and other academics like Michele Goodwin, a chancellor’s professor of law at the University of California Irvine, and Andrew Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, claim that the Dodds decision forces Black women back into a system similar to enslavement, without control of person reproductive rights or autonomy to plan a family on their own terms.
So if the 13th bans the specific “peculiar institution” of slavery, along with that ban should be the ability to control Black women’s bodies. My History Shakes were through the roof as my brain kept essentially tying the reproductive rights of Black women to the body autonomy of all 😳😱🤯!
Now, this could be a stretch, and I'm absolutely not a legal scholar, but boy, is it a fascinating idea to think about.
This session of History Bites looks at two ways that Black women took back some of their autonomy, using their mind and their bodies to do so. Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks intrinsically knew the danger they were putting themselves in as they advocated for others. Maybe the 13th Amendment and academics like Peggy Cooper Davis are offering an alternative way for us to do the same that will combat what is currently in place.
Anyhoo… I’m still pulling on the strings on this discovery, but if you want to look into this, too, here are a few articles that will get you started.
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