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Unshackling Black Motherhood, Dorothy E. Roberts
Unshackling Black Motherhood, Dorothy E. Roberts
Michigan Law Review
When stories about the prosecutions of women for using drugs during pregnancy first appeared in newspapers in 1989, I immediately suspected that most of the defendants were Black women. Charging someone with a crime for giving birth to a baby seemed to fit into the legacy of devaluing Black mothers. I was so sure of this intuition that I embarked on my first major law review article based on the premise that the prosecutions perpetuated Black women's subordination. My hunch turned out to be right: a memorandum prepared by the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project documented cases brought against pregnant women …