African Americans, health care, and the reproductive freedom movement in Detroit, 1918-1945.

Abstract

This dissertation is an examination of how African American experiences and attitudes, in light of historical, social, and cultural contexts, impacted the definition, use and distribution of health care services, particularly surrounding reproductive freedom, during the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that African Americans faced not merely the desire to control or limit reproduction but also the desire to guarantee safe reproduction; and both of these goals depended upon the guarantee of adequate and available health care practitioners and facilities for black men, women, and children. Thus the Reproductive Freedom Movement conjoined a general movement within African American communities toward better health care and professional opportunities and the birth control movement in the larger society which struggled for greater acceptance of and accessibility to reproductive technology. Nevertheless, the Reproductive Freedom Movement maintained an identity all its own demanding access to and control of safe contraceptive technology, protesting illegal abortions and sterilization campaigns, fighting not only for the right to proper maternity care in order to bear healthy children but also for the right of all African Americans to have access to health resources, and struggling to create health care facilities for African Americans and to obtain professional training and status for black practitioners. This study looks at both national developments and at the Reproductive Freedom Movement in one local area, Detroit, Michigan. It begins with the founding of Dunbar Hospital in 1918 and explores the institutional settings and cultural world of the RFM, including the work of the Urban League, the Visiting Nurses Association, the Baby Clinic, the Mother's Clinic, the Maternal Health League and even the Second Baptist Church which was transformed into an instrument of the movement with its focus on marital relations and sex education. Drawing on Aldon Morris' work on the factors involved in the development of an indigenous social movement, I show how pre-existing institutional resources, including organizations, communication networks, and leaders, were transformed to develop a movement which defined reproductive rights as an essential part of health care rights. Medical records, organizational papers, journals, and newspapers provide a glimpse into this indigenously-based social movement in one locale.