This young lady on the table is Anarcha. She was only 17. She wasn’t given a voice, she wasn’t given a choice. Even after a very traumatic labour and delivery, she was subjected to over 30 operations over four years of experimentation at the hands of the man standing to the right of her…

That man is heralded throughout America as the Father of Gynaecology and has statues throughout the US, some of which have recently been removed. That man performed barbaric gynaecological experimentations on enslaved Black women and was celebrated for his advances in medication, yet caused untold suffering by operating under the racist notion that Black people did not feel pain so did not need to use anaesthetic.

His experiments were not to be the last unethical medical genocides and violations of human life throughout history but play a large role in the continuous belief that STILL is perceived largely within the medical field and affects the maternal mortality rates of Black women in the US and the UK. 

They assume that Black women do not feel pain in the same way and often ignore their concerns that something is wrong or does not feel right which can often result in emergency treatment being required and can often end in severe trauma/suffering and death for the mother and/or the child.

Black women in England are four times more likely to die in pregnancy or within the first six weeks of childbirth than their White counterparts, according to an inquiry into maternal deaths.