I saw a post today that stopped me cold. My oldest daughter shared it, probably not knowing what it was about to stir up in me.

It talked about J. Marion Sims, the man history calls the “father of modern gynecology,” and the three enslaved Black women he used to build that legacy.

Anarcha Westcott. Lucy. Betsey. Lucy and Betsey weren’t even given last names. They endured many experimental surgeries. No anesthesia. No consent. Their enslavers signed off so their bodies could be used, and then history nearly swallowed their names whole.

Before I go any further, let me say this clearly and I mean it from the bottom of my heart. This is not about anger. It is not about pointing fingers at people today for what happened centuries ago. Nobody reading this is responsible for what was done to those women and I would never suggest otherwise.

What this is about is education, and motivation.

I believe that when we know better, we are motivated to do better. To pay attention. To notice how the people around us are being treated. To speak up when something does not sit right. That is the only agenda here.

So if you are still with me, let us talk.
After reading my daughter’s post my own memory came rushing back.

I was in labor with my youngest child. Excruciating, full body labor. I continously asked for pain medication. I asked a few times in that 3 and a half hours of labor.  The nurses kept coming in to see how many centimeters I was dilated, monitoring my progress, watching my body do what it was doing. Every time I asked for something to take the edge off, and everytime the answer was the same. We have to wait for the doctor. The doctor is busy. We can’t authorize that without the doctor. Apparently the doctor was busy for three and a half hours.

They didn’t offer ice chips. They didn’t offer anything. Not one basic comfort measure that is standard practice for every laboring woman. Just three and a half hours of unmanaged, unacknowledged, unrelieved pain.

So they watched. They checked. They documented. But they did not help me.
Three and a half hours later, the doctor finally arrived. By then I was about to deliver. When I asked again, asked for the relief I had been requesting for hours, the answer was almost worse than the wait itself. You’re too far along. You’re getting ready to have this baby. It’s time to push.

So I got nothing. For the entire labor.
I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I need you to understand what was actually happening in that room. It was not incompetence. It was not a scheduling conflict. Those nurses were present enough to monitor me. They were attentive enough to track my dilation every few minutes. They were in and out of that room consistently. They simply were not moved enough by my pain to fight for my relief, or to advocate with another doctor for me.

That is a very old story dressed in modern scrubs.

The belief that Black women experience pain differently, that we are somehow built to endure more, that our suffering is more tolerable, did not die in the 1840s when Sims was operating on Anarcha without anesthesia while a room full of doctors watched. It followed us out of that era and into labor and delivery rooms, emergency rooms, and doctor’s offices across this country. Research has confirmed it. Black women are systematically undertreated for pain compared to white patients presenting the same symptoms, making the same requests, in the same facilities.

We are monitored but not believed. Observed but not relieved.

Now I will tell you this. I do not walk around carrying this memory every day. Time has a way of softening the edges of even the sharpest pain. But when something like my daughter’s post shows up on my feed, it cracks the door back open and I remember exactly what that room felt like. I remember exactly what my body was going through and exactly what I was denied.

Don’t get me wrong, I won in the end. God’s Grace blessed me even in that painful situation with my youngest heartbeat, my daughter Monique came into this world and she is beyond incredible. Absolutely amazing. So yes, I was the winner. But winning the outcome does not erase what it cost to get there. And it does not mean I deserved the neglect that surrounded one of the most vulnerable moments of my life.

I share all of this not in anger, but in awareness. Most people scrolling past a post like the one Christina shared have never heard the names Anarcha Westcott, Lucy, or Betsey. They did not learn them in school. They were not in the textbooks.

That absence is part of the problem, because when we do not know the history, we cannot recognize when its echoes show up in the present.

What happened to those women was not isolated. Enslaved people were regularly rented out by their owners to physicians and medical institutions for exactly this kind of experimentation. Their bodies were considered available. Their pain was considered irrelevant. And the medical field that was built, in part, on that foundation has never fully stopped to reckon with what it cost them.

I am not asking anyone to carry guilt for history they did not make. I am asking us all to carry the truth of it. The truth has a way of changing how we see things, how we advocate for ourselves, and how we show up for the women in our lives when they say they are in pain and no one seems to be listening.

Anarcha. Lucy. Betsey. Remember them. Not just as names on a post. Picture them. Picture a woman lying on a table, surgery after surgery, no anesthesia, no relief, no choice. Picture a room full of male doctors treating her body as a research subject while she endured what no human being should ever be asked to endure.

We live in a time when people march in the streets and raise their voices loudly against cruelty to animals. Not one person in that room advocated for those women.

Now before anyone jumps into the comments to say, but I am white and this happens to me too, I hear you. And I mean that sincerely. The truth is we are all underserved by a system that was not built with us in mind. But I do not want us to lose sight of something important. The women whose bodies helped write the medical books we still use today never had their names put in them. That is the part of this conversation that deserves its own space.

That is all this is. A woman who remembered something. Who wanted to make sure a few more people knew the names Anarcha Westcott, Lucy, and Betsey before they kept scrolling. And who hopes that knowing their story moves somebody to pay a little closer attention to the world around them and the people in it.

Their cries were real. Their pain was real. And every single moment of it was witnessed by the One who sees what man refuses to acknowledge.

“The cries of the unacknowledged do not go unheard in heaven.”
1 Enoch 9:10 (Ethiopian Canon)