Before planned parenthood and ‘abortion rights’, government-endorsed sterilisations in the United States
66,000 reproductive surgeries were performed nationwide in 33 states that enacted sterilization laws in the 20th century, 1907–1983.
20 世紀，1907–1983，美國 33 個實行絕育法的州進行了 66,000 生育手術。
As late as 1981, Oregon approved one final sterilization. [6] The boards of eugenics were directly related to the eugenics movement, which sought to ‘better’ humanity by preventing supposedly inferior people from reproducing. [8]
Between 1930s and 1970s, approximately one-third of the female population of Puerto Rico were sterilized, making it the highest rate of sterilization in the world. Despite the high rate of sterilizations, the dark history of these operations remains understudied and hidden in the shadows of history. Some argue that the pressure to increase sterilization procedures was a targeted practice to decrease the high level of poverty and unemployment. The government blamed these issues on overpopulation on the island. [5]
The legalization of contraception in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican government’s passage of a law allowing sterilization to be conducted at the discretion of a eugenics board both occurred in 1937. Soon after the legal change, a program endorsed by the U.S. government began sending health department officials to rural parts of the island advocating for sterilization. By 1946, postpartum sterilizations happened frequently in various Puerto Rican hospitals. However, a year later, a report found that a quarter of women who had been sterilized regretted the decision. [4] Catholics and nationalists fought against the sterilizations in the 1950s, eventually resulting in the law being repealed in 1960. [5]
In the 1930s, doctors in Puerto Rico falsely pushed women into sterilizations as the only means of contraception. It is estimated that between 1947 and 1948, 7% of Puerto Rican women were sterilized, and by 1956, one out of three women suffered the same fate. [2] The women of the Young Lords, the revolutionary organization that fought for the self-determination of Puerto Ricans, argued that in many cases Puerto Ricans were told their tubes were being tied, but never told it was an irreversible procedure. The documentary La Operacion explores these abuses in further detail. [8]
Carrie Buck, the first person impacted by Virginia’s sterilization statute, was the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, the infamous 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case, in which the justices overwhelmingly upheld the constitutionality of Virginia’s sterilization law. [1]
In 1970, a whistleblower exposed evidence of rampant abuses at the Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center, where mostly Mexican women were coerced into agreeing to be sterilized. Evidence showed that Spanish-speaking women were repeatedly approached during childbirth and pressured to sign consent forms written in English.
In a subsequent lawsuit led by co-counsel Antonia Hernandez, who went on to head MALDEF, that became known as the Madrigal Ten, the women sued to end the practice of sterilization without informed consent. The judge that blamed it all on a communication breakdown. He went on to argue that he believed Mexican women draw their worth from ‘rearing’ a large family, so their pain came not from being sterilized against their will, but because they could not fulfill their Mexican duties. He ruled in favor of the USC-Los Angeles County Medical Center. [8]
When the suit came to trial in 1978, Judge Jesse W. Curtis ruled that neither of these charges was true. ‘This case is essentially the result of a breakdown in communications between the patients and the doctors’, Curtis wrote. ‘Misunderstandings’ occurred because the women were, primarily, Spanish-speakers. Some of them, including Dolores Madrigal and Consuelo Hermosillo, had even signed consent forms for their procedures. Their emotional distress at being sterilized, Curtis wrote, was caused by their ‘cultural background’ as immigrants from rural Mexico who believed that a woman’s worth is tied to her ability to raise a large family — not by their sterilizations. Dr. E. J. Quilligan, the head of County Hospital’s obstetrics unit, and a pioneer in lifesaving fetal-monitoring technology, told a reporter, ‘We were practicing good medicine.’
After Judge Curtis’s ruling, Hermosillo’s silence cemented. She never built friendships with the other plaintiffs. Some of them, she’d learned, were being beaten and castigated by their husbands for being sterilized. Her husband didn’t do that. But Hermosillo had no one to confide in either. Once, she told me, she accompanied her son to a funeral for his friend’s mother and was surprised by the photographs at the wake: Until that moment, she had no idea that the deceased was also one of the ‘Madrigal ten’. [3]
The sterilization apologies also conflate eugenics and sterilization, implying either that the two were synonymous or that the ineluctable outcome of the implementation of ideas associated with eugenics, above all racial hygiene and selective breeding, was forced sterilization. For example, in his January 2003 apology ‘on behalf of the people of South Carolina’, Governor Jim Hodges lamented the ‘decades of suffering and pain caused by eugenics’, which he then described as the more than 250 involuntary sterilizations performed in his state. So closely tying eugenics to sterilization can also make it hard to extract American eugenics from the shadow of Nazism. Without doubt, familiarity with German race hygiene is imperative to grasp the international context in which eugenics arose in the early twentieth century and to understand how medical abuse can converge with dictatorial politics to produce genocide. All too often, however, the Holocaust, which solidified in collective memory as a distinct event in the 1970s, provides the compelling time-scape on which to plot American eugenics. This has significant temporal and thematic ramifications.
On one hand, it suggests a rise-and-fall chronology of American eugenics, peaking in the 1930s and falling into disfavor if not ridicule by the mid-1940s. Yet programs guided by the tenets of better breeding and biological determinism continued into the 1950s and 1960s and were often not challenged in legislatures and courts until the 1970s and even the 1980s. For example, the national origins quotas of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which were based on simplistic theories of racial stocks and Mendelian traits, were not replaced by the family origins system until 1965. Even more telling, most states did not repeal their sterilization laws until the final quarter of the twentieth century, and in several states, such as North Carolina, the rate of sterilization markedly increased in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the rationale for sterilization shifted over this time period, from one based on the transmission of faulty genes down the family line to one centered more and more on the purported negative consequences of unfit parenthood, dysfunctional families, and overpopulation, sterilizations in North Carolina were still authorized by state laws and adjudicated by the state's eugenics board.
On the other hand, the historical narrative enshrined by the apologies also impedes the insertion of complicated actors into the storyline. When Kitzhaber issued his words of regret in Oregon and swore that such abuses would never be repeated, he also pronounced that the day observed worldwide as the anniversary of the United Nations’ 1948 Human Rights Declaration would now be a “day on which Oregonians will hereafter celebrate our state's commitment to human decency and personal freedom.” But where, in this reclamation of human rights over darkness, would the originator of Oregon's sterilization law fit? Oregon's law was passed largely due to the relentless agitation of one of the first female physicians in the Northwest, Bethenia Owens-Adair, a suffragette and outspoken feminist who few critics and scholars would associate with Nazi racial hygienists. Like many early eugenicists, Owens-Adair made the leap from better plant and animal breeding to human improvement. Touting the humanitarian and enlightened principles of objectivity and medical science, Owens-Adair pushed for Oregon's sterilization statute, which remained on the books from 1917 until 1983. More broadly, as research has shown, eugenics in America (and across the world) was wide-ranging, encompassing and straddling many social and scientific domains, such as juvenile welfare, mental testing, and nature conservation, just to name a few. And in some cases, the eugenically motivated expansion of these domains, such as maternal and infant care programs that sought to produce better babies and sounder families, offered many parents access to health services and information that hitherto had been unavailable or unknown. [1]
2020 fall, headlines of forced sterilizations at the for-profit Irwin County ICE detention center in Georgia, dominated the news cycle. A formal complaint filed by an ICE nurse with Homeland Security’s Inspector General alleged that detainees were denied medical care and were possibly forced into unnecessary hysterectomies. [7][8]
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Stern, Alexandra Minna. 2005-12-21. Eugenics and historical memory in America. History compass, volume 3, issue 1, 2005-01.
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Presser, Harriet B. 1969-11. The role of sterilization in controlling Puerto Rican fertility. Population studies, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 343–61. JSTOR.
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The New York times. 2016-02-01. Valdes, Marcela. When doctors took ‘family planning’ into their own hands.
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Bauza, Vanessa. 1994 09–10. Puerto Rico: The covert campaign to sterilize women. Ms., vol. 5, issue 14.
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Panoramas. 2017-10-30. Andrews, Katherine. The dark history of forced sterilization of Latina women. Center for Latin American studies, University of Pittsburgh.
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Embryo project encyclopedia. 2013-04-22. Lawrence, Cera R. Oregon State Board of Eugenics, link. Embryo project. Arizona state university.
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The guardian. 2020-12-22. Bekiempis, Victoria. More immigrant women say they were abused by Ice gynecologist.
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Unidos US. 2021-12-16. Arce, Julissa. The long history of forced sterilization of Latinas.