We Are Pregnant with Freedom : Black Feminist Storytelling for Reproductive Justice

Abstract

Situated at the crossroads of author Stacie Selmon McCormick’s lived experiences as a Black birthing person, mother, and scholar, We Are Pregnant with Freedom traces Black sexual and reproductive liberation through the storytelling work of those most marginalized in reproductive justice research and discourse. The book recounts McCormick’s loss of twin sons to stillbirth, her near-fatal experience with preeclampsia, and her subsequent reproductive justice research and advocacy work with the Afiya Center, a Black-led reproductive justice organization in Texas. Its multidisciplinary narrative shatters the silences wrought by stigma and historical erasure, ultimately proposing a new grammar of reproductive justice that can serve the people as a vehicle for community building, healing, and bodily liberation. “Stacie Selmon McCormick’s unique offering is her focus on storytelling, and specifically on Black women’s testimonies about their own reproductive journeys. Her collaboration with the Afiya Center grounds the book in community, weaving together scholarship, theory, and lived experience in service of imagining new futures. A fascinating, engaging, and impeccably researched read.” — DANI McCLAIN, author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood “We Are Pregnant with Freedom is exquisitely multidisciplinary, using a wide variety of cultural texts to investigate multiple forms of reproductive injustice. McCormick’s work sheds new light on our understanding of disability justice, carcerality, and anti-Blackness and the afterlives of slavery. This is a truly singular book that resists categorization.” — KHIARA M. BRIDGES, author of Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization