Comment on Chapter 4 Paragraph

On pages 66-67 of Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, it states: "Among the slaves, almost all the skilled jobs, like maintaining mill equipment, building sugar barrels, or doing masonry, went to men. This meant that--contrary to the picture in most Britons' minds, then and now-- the majority of slaves in the fields of plantations like Codrington were women. The fact that women did the hardest labor, combined with their abysmal diet, delayed menarche and brought and end to a slave woman's fertility by her mid-thirties. In the mid eighteenth-century British West Indies, fully half of all women sugar slaves never bore a child."

I find this paragraph particularly irritating. To be honest, I can't really think of the right word to describe how I feel about this fact. After further reading in Chapter 4, I find out that after slavery was abolished in the Caribbean, there were only 670,000 former slaves left, after bringing over 2,000,000 to the Caribbean from West Africa, whereas in the southern states of the U.S., only 500,000 slaves were brought from West Africa and over 4 million remained when slavery was abolished. This is horrible. I'm astonished by the fact that these Caribbean slave owners worked so many people to death on sugar plantations. I really don't understand why so many people let so many be killed for so long. Or were the British people, some of whom made all of their money off the sugar and slave trades, really just that clueless? Maybe some just didn't care because they were so wealthy. I honestly have no idea. It's baffling. If these women had never been put into slavery, they would have been bound for marriage and children. But instead, over half of all women enslaved in the Caribbean never had children. This makes me sad. A lot of women now always dream of having children; I'm sure it was the same for the women in this time period. I could not imagine being a woman in the time and being enslaved in the Caribbean, knowing that I would be worked to death on the sugar plantations before having children. It must have been devastating for them.