Racism causes high infertility in Black women

There persists an old, racist myth that Black women are somehow exceptionally fertile.

This is a misconception scientists helped perpetrate, establishing without evidence in the early 1900s that Black women were more likely to become pregnant than women of other races. In 1932, for instance, the journal Birth Control Review wrote in an issue devoted to Black fertility that “the present submerged condition of the Negro is due in large part to the high fertility of the race,” notes Edna Bonhomme, a historian of science at Bard College Berlin.

This myth of Black hyper-fertility has been internalized within Black communities, too, and it’s still largely alive today across society. So much so that it’s contributing to making the opposite true: Black women are actually twice as likely as white women to suffer from infertility, according to the most recent data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both from primary infertility (an inability to become pregnant) and secondary infertility (an inability to become pregnant after having conceived in the past).

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