The slaves on boarding the slave ships from their homeland, Africa, did not do so willingly but forcefully as they saw it as a long and tortuous journey towards a life perpetual bondage in colonies. .
Women, especially, were the ones that could not bare the thought of leaving their homeland or even giving up a state of freedom for the conditions of bondage. There were instances on the slave ship where women refused everything given to eat. As a result their physical and moral condition deteriorated until death was imminent. The captains of the ship saw this as a loss of potential profit and had them returned to the land to be cared for until the ship was ready to depart. Once they realized that they were to aboard the ship once again some tried to escape while others killed themselves.
Once the slaves were sold and introduced into the plantation system, they continued to resist individually and collectively by means of suicide. Death, especially for the women was not only seemed as a liberation from the extreme conditions of slavery but, regarding t their African beliefs, as a means of escape permitting the dead to return to their native land. However, for the women, amongst the others had feelings of despair or, conversely, of outrage dignity and pride were not the only actors provoking suicide. Women who committed suicide either individually or collectively did so to inflict serious economic damage, if not ruin, upon the master, as they were the ones regarded valuable for they could reproduce. As a means of resistance, then, suicide by women was also an offensive measure that could go beyond purely personal considerations and, in the same blow, aimed at the economic base of a planter.
Slave women often resorted to abortion and even infanticide as a form of resistance rather than to permit their children to grow up under the abomination of slavery. Women who committed infanticide, the death of the child resulted from a sickness such as "mal de machoina", or lockjaw, a sickness that struck only newborn babies and only those delivered by black mid-wives and this occurred within the first few days.