They want to force ALL women

When I commented on the above viral (and vile) headline about Trump urging women to have children—I flippantly stated, “the silent part is white.” That is an oversimplification. As with most aspects of racialized U.S. political economy, the truth is buried deep in the backyard under the mud, gravel, and insects and next to the “peculiar institution.” The control of women’s reproduction isn’t just about white hegemonic demographic panic. It’s also about capitalism’s reliance on bodies that can birth ideology in the flesh and bone: Black women as tools for profit, white women as vessels for hegemonic order.

This dynamic takes on different brutalities depending on if located on the Northern or Southern geography or their parallel political boundaries —e.g. Los Angeles, California is viewed as the political North.

In more progressive Northern states—and they are more progressive than Southern states despite their own brand of vileness—abortion is legal. Abortion in the North is somewhat respected as a right. But rights do not equal liberation if the spirit of the right is perverted and disrespected. In hyper-segregated areas like Chicago and New Jersey, apartheid-like conditions persist. Conditions where underfunded hospitals disproportionately harm Black people giving birth, institutions are hollowed out via resources stolen by redevelopment, and union jobs systematically exclude Black workers specifically. In these cases the right of abortion often seems to function as less of a choice and more like a mechanism of population control—a way to stem Black births and lessen the states’ ”Burden.”

The Northern stereotype of “lazy, uppity” Black communities—a myth weaponized since the Second Great Migration—justifies the slashing of the social service net for everyone, the suppression of labor organizing, and the funneling of Black workers into gig economy instability. Many women may be grateful for reproductive choices, but those choices are often only accessible to the few, while residents of historically excluded and formerly redlined Black neighborhoods are upzoned into corners —with no way out.

Yet, that framing is incomplete, though heard more frequently owing to the entertainment and media centers of New York and Los Angeles.

Most African Americans live in the South—a fact not incidental, but rooted in an over 200 years’ legacy of chattel slavery. That system, and the ideologies it produced, still shape the region and mind of Dixie —and often the country.

Southern reproductive coercion of women of African descent traces its roots directly to some of slavery’s most sadistic blueprints, codified in doctrines like the Mudsill Theory. In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond declared that every society needs a “mudsill” class to perform menial labor—“a race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility.”

I am reminded of the documentary “Birthing a Nation” which tells the story of Mary Gaffney, an enslaved woman who took control of her body and fertility, usurping the practice of breeding Black women in the antebellum South by using cotton root as birth control. An act that denied her captor money and labor.

Today, states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia continue to enforce this logic. Abortion bans and Medicaid restrictions force Black women to birth into poverty, while schools, clinics, and communities are starved of resources. TANF’s (welfare) punitive work requirements push Black people into $7.25/hour poultry plants, subsidizing corporations that then lobby against wage hikes. Meanwhile, a pipeline built on hyper-policing, crumbling infrastructure, and institutional neglect feeds a prison labor system where incarcerated Black people pick crops or fight wildfires for pennies.

This is not about pro life morality. It’s not even solely about erasure. Antiblackness doesn’t always seek elimination—it thrives on sustained amplified humiliation. Forced birth, frayed social nets complemented by substandard pay, and prison labor are interlocking tools to strip Black life of autonomy and reduce Black women to literal vessels of exploited labor.

As Saidiya Hartman reminds us, the spectacle of Black suffering—segregated healthcare, school closures, police violence, infantilizing welfare rhetoric—isn’t incidental. It functions to justify extraction by reinforcing myths of Black inferiority.

Some argue the North and South are “two sides of the same coin.” But this isn’t a coin—it’s a hydra.

There is no “side” in this nation that does not objectify racialized people— and even working class white people are racialized if you zoom out.

The solution isn’t just protecting abortion access security social net, or honoring the social contract (though this is part of it). The solution is dismantling the entire belief system that sees humans that give birth not as humans, but as capital’s raw material. It means abolishing TANF’s punitive structure, ending prison slavery, and demanding the right to be valuable without giving birth to labor or ideology.

Black people are not factories that produce mudsills. Those who give birth are not sites of reproductive labor (WOC) nor power (White Women). And the political meaning of “woman” must refuse single stories simply because a woman is also the member of a geographical, cultural or gendered minority group.

We must resolve to reject narratives that narrow personhood and the human experience— simply because one is not a man.