The cases of Cherise Doyley and Briana Bennet, two African women who were court ordered to undergo cesarean sections against their will, uncovers the ratchedy, sickly, decaying colonialism asserting itself through institutions that still claim ownership over African women’s bodies.
Let’s be clear. A court ordering surgery on a conscious, competent woman who has expressed her desire to give birth naturally is not care. It is coercion backed by state power.
The reality is that African women still do not have full autonomy over our own reproduction. Not in the hospital. Not in the courtroom. Not in a system built on our forced labor, our stolen children and our regulated wombs.
Colonial hospitals and the extraction of the sick
Hospitals are not neutral spaces.
Despite whatever individual goodwill a nurse or doctor may have, the institution operates on a policy of extraction. It extracts from the patients and it is transactional at its core. Our bodies enter as sites of intervention, immediately under new management.
When an African woman walks into that space to give birth, she is entering a colonial structure that has already defined her as an object to be acted upon.
When a judge can enforce an unwanted medical intervention, that is colonial authority asserting itself over African women’s reproduction.
The separation of mother and child as policy
Cesarean sections are no small thing. They are major surgeries. They are controlled. They are scheduled. They allow hospitals to manage birth on their terms, not ours.
They turn birth into a managed and billable process, rather than a human one rooted in the autonomy of the mother. It’s where insurance rewards intervention and where African women are already positioned as “high risk” regardless of our actual health.
So when African women are disproportionately pushed, pressured or in these cases legally forced into surgical birth, the African community has to ask what interests are being served. Because this is not about one doctor or one judge. It is about the African child being separated, subjectively and objectively, from the African mother.
The child becomes something to be managed. The mother becomes someone to be overridden; Once that relationship is broken by policy, the state can step in at every stage of life.
Family policing is colonialism in practice
The State that can order a scalpel to dissect into an African woman’s body in the name of “protecting the child” is the same State that will take that child once they are born.
This is the terrain of the African National Women’s Organization’s #ArrestCPS campaign.
Family policing in the United States disproportionately targets African families, surveils African mothers and removes African children under the justification of “neglect” or “risk.” But what is consistently defined as neglect is nothing more than conditions imposed on us by the colonial State itself.
The colonial State doesn’t care about the health and wellbeing of African children, born or unborn. At every turn the colonial State practices an, “f them kids,” approach.
Because a State that claims to protect children while routinely traumatizing them, separating them from their families and cycling them through instability is not about care. A State that removes children for conditions rooted in poverty, then punishes the family for those conditions, is about control.
The foundation of it all: the control of African women
Despite our best efforts, we cannot reform the colonial system. African women’s reproduction has been victimized since colonial capitalism’s birth. The fact that modern gynecology was advanced as a result of the torture of dozens of enslaved African women, at the hands of James Marion Sims, is indicative of the extractive foundation of modern obstetrics and gynecology that, up until interventions made by African women, would still consider us as objects. Thankfully there is a movement in medicine spearheaded by African women, to end “race based” medicine.
What Cherise and Briana’s experiences show us, is that more needs to be done. Their stories are renewing conversations about African women’s bodies and how we are treated in these institutions, by connecting it to the ongoing war against African people.
