On Adriana Smith, Anti-Blackness, Experimentation, and Disregard for Black Uteruses and Black Women

Trigger warning: Descriptions of anti-Black woman hate and harm, anti-Blackness, and reproductive trauma.

Adriana Smith and her family should've never had to endure this horrible and traumatic public experiment in postmortem childbirth.

What Georgia did to Adriana Smith would never happen to a person of pallor with a uterus. And there's nobody out there that can tell me otherwise, because trying to deny this fact is an openly raised middle finger to the history of the mistreatment and bodily harm done to Black women and Black bodies for centuries on stolen land.

Even in a country that is on the fast track to remove reproductive rights and body choice from every person with a uterus and jail people for making personal choices that have nothing to do with the state, there is no way this would've been allowed to happen if Adriana Smith were a person of pallor. The news would've been running stories every damn day. Reproductive rights lawyers would've been coming out of the woodwork. But that didn't happen, did it?

And we all know why.

So instead of people of pallor and pallor-led legal aid organizations with power and positionality who claim they care about reproductive rights partnering with Adriana's family to fight for her rights, as they would with any cis woman of pallor with a uterus (because, let's be real, that's about all they would stand up for), last Friday, Georgia performed a C-section on a Black woman who was declared brain-dead in February and forced to be on a ventilator to conceive a child because, you know, laws and sh**.

And now, this 1-pound, 13-ounce child whose deceased mother was kept on a ventilator, unable to provide the nutrients needed to fully nurture his growth and development, is now fighting for his life in the neonatal intensive care unit because, you know, laws and sh**.

Cis women of pallor love quoting The Handmaid's Tale to describe the level of danger people with uteruses are in while openly choosing not to sit with the undeniable fact that Black women and Black bodies have always been subject to centuries of Handmaid's Tale-level sh** at the hands of people of pallor since colonizers forced Black bodies into chattel slavery.

Adriana deserved better.

Her child deserved better.

Black women deserve better.

Some Thoughts on Voting on Election Day 2022

Image description: A screenshot of a measure from the 2022 Oregon midterm election. The measure centers around the Oregon State Constitution stating that slavery and involuntary servitude are prohibited - unless it’s considered punishment for a crime.

Here’s an example of why voting matters. The picture accompanying these words is a ballot measure rundown for the Oregon 2022 midterms. The highlighted measure in question is a measure called Measure 112. Measure 112 addresses a state constitutional matter. You see, the Oregon State Constitution was amended some years ago to remove most of the white supremacist racist language that was its foundation. Not all. Most. Most of the language was addressed via amendments. However, those amendments created loopholes in state constitutional law. And what is the loophole that Measure 112 addresses? Slavery and involuntary servitude are prohibited - unless it’s considered punishment for a crime.

You read that right.

I should’ve been surprised when I saw this on the ballot, but I wasn’t. Over the years, I’ve seen some of the horrific things removed from the Oregon State Constitution, leftovers from Oregon’s founding as a white utopia. What sits with me whenever I see these things is that we have to put removing racist laws from a state constitution to a freaking vote. This should be a given: abolish hateful laws without asking the public for their opinion. Yet we all know we couldn’t be further from a consensus on hate and history as a country if we tried. And you know some people will vote “no” on removing this hateful loophole. If enough people don’t vote “yes” to have this removed, how long do you think it’ll take before some cruel creature of a person or law enforcement in some small Oregon town weaponizes this loophole?

Why do we vote? We vote because we are nowhere near a point in U.S. history where our laws and human rights are intended to apply to all citizens.

[Image description: A screenshot of a measure from the 2022 Oregon midterm election. The measure centers around the Oregon State Constitution stating that slavery and involuntary servitude are prohibited - unless it’s considered punishment for a crime.]