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Quasi-Colonial Bodies: An Analysis Of The Reproductive Lives Of Poor Black And Racially Subjugated Women, Khiara M. Bridges

Faculty Scholarship

This Article analyzes the relationship between the struggle for the recognition of Black women's reproductive rights in the United States and the fight for racial justice. Specifically, it argues that the problematization of poor Black women's fertility--evidenced by the depiction of single Black motherhood as a national crisis, the condemnation of poor Black women who rely on public assistance, and the portrayal of their children as an embryonic "criminal class"--ought to be understood as a form of contempt for Black women's reproductive rights. Differently stated, the lack of acknowledgment in legal, political, and popular discourse that motherhood is a legitimate …