Kendall Lawrenz
90 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1018
From the early introduction of slavery to the United States, not only did the economic prosperity of slavery depend on extracting reproductive labor from Black birthing people, but so did the field of medicine. Enslaved Black people were experimented on and forced to undergo inhumane procedures in the name of science, yet as the medical profession grew Black people were then denied the benefit of the same medical services that were available to white people in the United States.
In recent years it has become more apparent that structural racism in health care is a public health crisis. Yet often there is less focus on how the legal community and the federal government have contributed to upholding structural racism and what legal and moral obligation these institutional actors have to make amends for the harm it has caused. The injustice of structural racism in health care is not only the effect it has on public health, but also the reality that those who are most directly harmed also bear the cost of this injustice with no legal remedy to challenge it. The law is not designed to protect against structural racism, and as a result those who continue to be oppressed and marginalized on a systemic level bear the cost. Too often this cost falls more directly on Black people in the United States. Nowhere is this more evident than in looking at racial disparity in Black maternal and infant mortality that persists regardless of wealth or other socio-economic indicators.
This Note argues that the federal government has both a legal obligation and a moral obligation to provide reparations to Black birthing people who continue to experience racial disparities in pregnancy outcomes due in part to structural racism. The legal system is not currently designed to provide remedies for the harms that structural racism has created and continues to perpetuate for Black birthing people. However, this Note explores the ways that the legal system’s design could in fact allow for such remedies using a reparations model that is based on similar examples of reparations-type programs the federal government has previously created.
