Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth

Abstract

For decades, sociologists and anthropologists have been at the forefront of theorizing and empirically documenting how racism negatively affects the health and well-being of socially marginalized racial groups in the United States (e.g., Bridges 2011; Gravlee and Sweet 2008; Williams and Sternthal 2010). By contrast, most public health researchers’ explanations for racial health disparities have largely on treated race as a risk factor, rather than attending to how racism operates as a powerful and enduring social determinant of worse health and health outcomes among African-Americans. Important exceptions exist, however, particularly in the area of maternal and child health. Arline Geronimus (1992) developed the ‘weathering hypothesis’ to describe how chronic stress resulting from a lifetime of discrimination contributes to higher rates of adverse birth outcomes among Black women. Around the same time, a collaborative of women of color founded the reproductive justice movement to draw attention to...