The only Black woman walking the face of the earth who cannot have a baby: Two Women's Stories

By Rosie Ceballo

Jocelyn saw her experiences with infertility as fundamentally different from and not comparable to those of White women. She explained, "So to drive all that distance, and I didn't feel that it was the same experience. Their husbands didn't mind going through the tests. My husband was not going to go and pump semen into a jar. It just wasn't going to happen. And for so many of my sisters, it's just not a problem getting pregnant, you know. The problem is trying not to get pregnant. And that was just so hard to deal with." Jocelyn's assumptions of racial differences are supported by all of the women interviewed. With few exceptions, the women reported that their African American husbands would not undergo medical tests or procedures to identify potential problems that they may be contributing to the couple's infertility. As importantly, Jocelyn believed that she had no sisters who might, with guidance from their own similar experiences, help her through her present traumatic endeavors.

Many of Jocelyn's extensive experiences with medical professionals and hospital staff mirrored and confirmed racialized scripts and sexist narratives for African American women. Because she was an African American woman complaining about reproductive problems, doctors and other hospital personnel frequently imagined her to be an overly promiscuous, highly fertile, sexualized woman. She recounted one incident,

"I went through a lot because I used to have a lot of pain, and I'd have these - still have these cysts....Sometimes I'd have to go to the emergency room, and they treat you like dirt because you're Black....One time I was at work, and I was in so much pain that I was on my knees. I was crying. And what it was was a cyst was rupturing. But I didn't know that that was what it was....And I got to the emergency room, and this was a male doctor. He was Indian, and he examined me. And he said, "You sure you don't have gonorrhea or syphilis or something like that ?" It's like, gee, you're Black, you're female, you're young--you must....and I was a virgin."

At other times, medical staff refused to believe that she did not have any children or any previous abortions. The message was unmistakable: as an African American woman, her difficulty conceiving a child was unheard of. She was an anomaly.

This material has been adapted and excerpted from "The only Black woman walking the face of the earth who cannot have a baby:" Two Women's Stories. In M. Romero & A.J. Stewart (Eds.), Women's Untold Stories: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity (pp. 3-19). New York: Routledge.