Dorothy Roberts wrote Killing the Black Body during her time as a law professor at Rutgers University, where she studied issues of gender, race, and class.

Female slaves were often brought from Africa to America for breeding, where their white male owners would rape them and sell their children for profit.

Finally, Roberts outlines initiatives to change the treatment of black women in America, writing that reproductive justice cannot occur without addressing racial oppression.

Roberts believes that money spent on in vitro fertilisation could be better redirected to improve reproductive rights of a greater number of women.

She also asserts that conversations about reproductive liberty should include mention of prenatal care being available to pregnant people as a right and opposition to state funding for abortions for women on benefits.

[1] Isis's Susan L. Smith summarized the book as "a well-written, passionate and enlightening exploration of the impact of racial politics on reproduction".

Smith found that Roberts was "at her best when commenting on the contemporary era", but criticized the lack of "examples of black women's resistance" and the "rather unsatisfactory repetition" of historical material which has been studied by Deborah Gray White and Angela Davis.