‘Rejoice! Your wombs will not beget slaves!’ Marronnage as Reproductive Justice in Colonial Haiti

Abstract

This paper explores the possible existence of organic reproductive justice actions among enslaved mothers and pregnant women in colonial Haiti (Saint Domingue) with specific focus on how marronnage – escape from slavery – provided them opportunities to exert power over their lives, bodies and biological reproduction. Reproductive justice is defined as the complete well-being of women and girls, based on their human right to decide when and how to have – or not have – children, and to parent existing children in safe and sustainable communities. The conditions of enslavement in Haiti were particularly detrimental to women's control over their fertility and overall reproductive health as birth rates remained so low that the enslaved population could not reproduce itself; however, findings from an underutilized archival roster containing demographic information on the only formally recognized community of maroons from colonial Haiti, the Maniel, indicate that the child-woman ratio among fugitive women was over twice as high as their counterparts who remained enslaved on plantations. Subversive reading of runaway slave advertisements also suggests that choosing to abscond was a rare but effective mechanism for women to achieve reproductive justice by exercising agency over their lives and protecting their childbearing capabilities. By highlighting motherhood during a state of fugitivity in one of the most economically prosperous slave societies in modern history, this paper can help establish historical precedent for contemporary reproductive justice claims. Moreover, maroon mothers' organic acts of reproductive justice have important implications for the study of how black women resist structures of racial capitalism that negatively impact their reproductive health and other areas of their lives.