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“Anarcha learned she had been sold…”

This chapter opens with several facets of Anarcha’s life that have been determined by inference rather than direct evidence. While Anarcha’s case record from Woman’s Hospital—which will be described later—specifies that as of 1851 she had had five pregnancies, there is no information about the dates of those pregnancies. To relate Anarcha’s story with specificity, I have taken the case history of another Woman’s Hospital patient, also famous, Mary Smith, who like Anarcha suffered from a great number of fistula surgeries (though Smith likely had the benefit of anesthesia). Smith too had had five pregnancies, some after acquiring her fistula, and her case was very specific about the dates of her births. I overlaid this information onto Anarcha’s history, and her pregnancies occur at similar intervals throughout. Later census records reveal that Anarcha had multiple additional pregnancies after she was released from Woman’s Hospital.

In addition, I am suggesting that some or all of the women who were part of the Alabama fistula experiments became pregnant—or had the opportunity of becoming pregnant—during the period of the experiments. I think this conclusion is unavoidable. Many of the women who were living in Sims’s makeshift hospital came from plantations, and in Montgomery they would have been experiencing a new degree of freedom, while remaining enslaved. As well, Sims was not a plantation owner—he never spoke or wrote of having hired an overseer or driver to keep track of the women. In any event, as this passage describes, it would not have wholly been in Sims’s interest to keep the women entirely celibate. He was attempting to appeal to a clientele of plantation owners, and his goal, ultimately—as it had been with other enslaved women upon whom he operated or performed experiments—would have been to restore their value as “breeders.” Finally, as the experiments dragged on, Sims would likely have used the enslaved women’s ability to procreate and return infants to plantations as incentive to allow the experiments to continue.