Is That Because They Are Usually Outsize Themselves?

Ayt least, the ones in the media usually are. Indeed, it's a wonder they can reproduce naturally at all! And no, it's not just the Western diet at play here. 

We lived in the shadow of factories bordering our beloved park. Companies such as the LeDoux Corporation, a chemical testing company that had worked on everything from the Manhattan Project to the moon landing, were just steps from the swings. While I was consumed by the potential danger of some shadowy, gun-toting figure, the real pain I felt was internal. My reproductive system betrayed me month after month, leaving me doubled over in excruciating pain. While the world validated my fear of violence, my period pain – marked by ER visits, surgeries and more than 30 Aleve each cycle – was dismissed as “in my head”. No one asked questions or explored its cause, let alone its potential environmental roots.

I’ve seen this film, Julia Roberts was great in it!

Black people are far more likely to live in areas filled with environmental toxins that can harm fertility. We’re 75% more likely to live near industrial facilities and breathe air that’s 38% more polluted than what white communities are exposed to. Discussions about toxins and the environment usually focus on cancer. However, a recent Human Rights Watch report found that air pollution is linked to gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia and fibroids.

And yet, there seems no discernible decrease in their fertility - as the US welfare bill would appear to indicate. 

Last year, I began a documentary about how the climate crisis – flooding, heat, wildfires, hurricanes – affects Black people who are pregnant or trying to conceive. It was an urgent story that felt both intimately familiar and strangely distant, since many of their environments were marked by large factories, disastrous floods and devastating hurricanes.

I can’t help but feel this really isn’t something can could be considered a bad thing. If it is actually happening. She's pinning her hopes on that, because it's providing her a tidy living:

Reniqua Allen-Lamphere is a film-maker and writer. She created the documentary Infertile Ground and founded Oshun Griot, a digital platform for people of color navigating infertility. Her next book, Fertility Noir, on Black experiences with infertility, will be published by Penguin Random House.

Am I alone, Reader, in thinking that less black fertility can only be a good thing for society?