What abolitionists found most shocking was that slave owners and estate agents made little or no special accommodation to receive newborns or to care for mothers even though they profited from the birth of slave children. Ramsay did not exaggerate when he wrote that the neglect of enslaved mothers and children extended to the absence of simple items of care, like rag and cloth to swaddle and cleanse their babies. Women delivered babies in their homes with the aid of their community members. Mothers returned to work less than three weeks after delivery, and they had no choice but to carry along their infants with them. As mothers toiled, Ramsay recalled, infants lay in the “furrow, near [them], generally exposed naked, or almost naked, to the sun and rain, on a kid skin, or such rags as [they] can procure.”16 Under these conditions, one could hardly expect infants to survive, which, as far as abolitionists were concerned, largely explained why West Indian slave populations failed to reproduce.
As a doctor who resided in the West Indies, Ramsay saw firsthand the rudimentary nature of health, maternal, and infant care before the 1780s. Yet he was disinterested in how enslaved women used planter neglect to seize autonomy over childbirth and maternal care. His criticism that the only facility available to the few women who gave birth was “a dark smoky hut” reflected how little he understood how women capitalized on planter disregard for their reproductive needs. These huts were the homes of women where assistance networks and herbal remedies flourished. Ramsay’s belief that an estate hospital staffed with European doctors would best serve the medical needs of reproductive women clashed with how enslaved people approached maternal and neonatal care. Smoking apparatuses and fires were essential to the birth customs that thrived within the private residences of the enslaved, which were relatively free from the oversight of masters. Birth rituals were symbols of autonomy and authority mothers and caregivers claimed over labor and delivery. Abolitionist ideals about reproductive care not only diverged from those held by enslaved women. The proposed reforms also foreshadowed the struggles to come between enslaved mothers and caregivers, on one hand, who fought to retain reproductive autonomy, and doctors, on the other hand, who sought to restructure plantation childbirth practices along the lines of European medicine.
Abolitionists believed that slavery’s assault on womanhood and maternity persisted because sugar plantation owners and managers calculated that it was more cost-effective to work their slaves to death and replace them with fresh imports than invest in their long-term care and self-rejuvenation. Given a choice “between the breeding system on the one hand, and the working down and buying system on the other,” Wilberforce explained in a public address, they “deliberately gave in to the latter as the most economical in the full view of all its horrid conditions.”17 The economic drive of West Indian planters made them insensitive to the need for sexual parity among their slaves. Viewing male workers as stronger and more productive workers, planters prioritized them in their purchases. The resulting imbalanced sex ratio in favor of men, Wilberforce argued, limited women’s opportunities to form partnerships and create stable families. Had planters adopted a practice of buying equal proportions of males and females, population increase would have occurred “naturally.”18 Abolitionist exaggeration of the disparity between the sexes conflicted with the supply dynamics of the slave trade and the buying patterns of planters. Despite a stated preference for men, planters readily bought women and tasked them with some of the most demanding work on the plantation. Enslaved women, for example, dominated field labor, one of the most demanding aspects of plantation work. The central problem was not the sex ratio of captives, but their age.
Few abolitionists recognized the links between an aging slave population and low fertility and high mortality rates. In his 1792 speech before Parliament Wilberforce called attention to age as a factor that retarded natural increase. Supporting Wilberforce was Henry Dundas, adviser to the British prime minister. Dundas introduced a bill in Parliament to impose a tax on the importation of Africans above age twenty-five. Given the recent fallout in the American colonies over the right of the imperial Parliament to tax the colonies, the idea of taxing the West Indian colonies was not one welcomed by the British government. The House of Lords therefore rejected Dundas’s proposed tax.19 New tariffs as a method of correcting the negative population growth caused by a surplus old population clashed with what Parliament believed was within the reaches of its power.
The contests between reformers and parliamentarians about monitoring reproduction rates reflect not just government ministers wishing to avoid conflicts with the colonies over constitutional rights of governance. The question was also whether the state had the right to scrutinize reproductive patterns, which many in England feared as a step toward intervention in intimate relations. These were viewed as private matters, and Britons in the mid to late eighteenth century were ambivalent about state scrutiny of marriage, sexuality, and family. Parliamentary approval for legislation like the 1762 Act for Keeping Regular, Uniform and Annual Registers of Poor Infants and the 1767 Act for the Better Regulation of Parish Poor Children evidence steps taken by the government to secure the welfare of children in England. The government’s simultaneous rejection of bills calling for a national census and the establishment of mandatory and annual registers of marriages, births, and deaths, however, suggests limitations on parliamentary measures that could lead to intervention in citizens’ reproductive and intimate lives.20
Such limits were class and gender based, however. Elite and middle-class men opposed marriage and birth censuses. However, they were not averse to local parishes registering the birthrate among poor women. Neither were they disinclined to promote motherhood as the natural and patriotic duty of British women. Eighteenth-century male English social commentators and medical practitioners, for instance, disparaged women who chose not to have children and scorned mothers who did not suckle their children. They deemed such women as profane, abnormal, and in violation of “natural law.” These criticisms partly emerged out of concern for the growing labor needs of Britain’s expanding empire. Reformer Jonas Hanway, for example, made a strong case for how preserving poor children’s lives served British imperial ambitions. Children were invaluable assets for the navy, army, and factories. Thus, in preparation for the Seven Years’ War, the government approved significant funding for the Foundling Hospital, tasked with saving the lives of destitute children who could be repurposed in war roles.21
Mutual gender and class biases made slave owners supporters of similar reforms in the colonies. They shared the views held by British reformers that reproduction was a resource for fulfilling the ambitions of empire, including individual economic drive. Moreover, the property rights whites claimed in the ownership of black bodies invested slaveholders with the liberty to do as they pleased with their slaves. The hesitation over slavery reforms resulted from concerns about profits. While the state absorbed poor relief costs for British mothers and children, individual planters in the colonies would have to withstand all costs associated with ameliorating the conditions of their slaves—their private property. Thus, while colonial legislators rejected what they calculated were costly improvements, like exempting women from field work, they more willingly conceded to low or zero cost interventions. The benefits and low cost of encouraging slave owners to buy younger slaves, for instance, likely drove the Jamaican Assembly to impose a ten-pound tax on the importation of captives above the age of twenty-five.22 The economic cost of amelioration was a major cause of disagreement between the local Jamaican state, still in its infancy, and the moral-minded abolitionist reformers.
The Pronatal Plan of Abolitionists
Abolitionists readily agreed on the inhumanity of slavery and the slave trade. They also concurred on the negative effects slavery had on the ability and desire of enslaved women to bear children and to raise families. But beyond general consensus on the need to outlaw the slave trade as an important first step in initiating pronatal reforms, there was much disagreement about the precise changes needed to capitalize on women’s reproductive potential.23 Disputes, for example, emerged over the provision of material rewards for enslaved mothers and their trustworthiness to assume responsibilities for childcare. The divergent pronatal plans