Confronting the Horror of Forced Sterilizations

IN SEPTEMBER 2020, reports emerged from the Irwin County Detention Center, an immigration facility in Georgia, detailing forced hysterectomies performed on migrant women held in custody. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Ocilla, Ga., owned and managed by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company, oversaw these surgeries in what have been described as appalling conditions and an “utter lack of care of detainees’ health” during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Tragically, as too many people fail to realize, forced sterilizations are not a recent development. Rather, as a form of state violence they date back more than 100 years, when states across the country (beginning in 1907 with Indiana and followed in 1909 by Washington, California, and Connecticut, as well as many others over time) approved “eugenic sterilization.” These early laws passed by state legislatures allowed state officials to sterilize males and females—some as young as 12 or 13 years old—believed to have inheritable and incurable diseases or afflictions, including insanity, mania, or dementia.

In subsequent years, those laws were relaxed and expanded when the hereditary requirement was removed, giving state medical officials wide discretion in determining what constituted “perverse” behaviors. These included everything from “feeblemindedness” (defined as having the maximum mental capacity of a 12-year-old), schizophrenia, manic depression, psychosis, epilepsy, or “sexual perversion” (including homosexuality, gender nonconformity, sex outside of marriage, and syphilis). Those with disabilities, such as blindness, deafness, and physical deformities, did not escape the operating table.

In so-called progressive states, particularly California, tens of thousands of people were sterilized without their or their parents or custodians’ consent. Between 1909 and 1979 (when sterilization laws were repealed or amended), California conducted 20,000 of the 60,000 recorded sterilizations nationwide. Researchers, such as Alexandra Minna Stern, author of the 2005 book Eugenic Nation, believe many more were carried out in private clinics and hospitals across the Golden State. But without access to medical records, one can only speculate on the extent of victimization.

Equally tragic is that the most vulnerable members of society have fallen, and continue to fall, victim to eugenic sterilization. Poor, undereducated, and marginalized women of color—specifically African American, Mexican and Mexican American, Native American, and Puerto Rican women—have been sterilized against their consent in disproportionate numbers. Gender-nonconforming people and impoverished white women, particularly unmarried mothers and those with many children, have been singled out as well.

In recent decades, Spanish-speaking women on state support, Native women on federal reservations, African American women in prisons, and migrant women have fallen prey to the U.S. federal detention apparatus. This system too often functions above and beyond the law, despite the beliefs of advocates that forced sterilization violates the Constitution, as well as the Hippocratic Oath, the ethical code for physicians. In the process, these women and their families have experienced years of loss and shame. Most people, often including the victims’ families, are unaware of this history, as the 2015 documentary No Más Bebés/No More Babies, by Rene Tajima-Peña and Virginia Espino, makes painfully clear.

We must remain vigilant in naming and stopping the ongoing overreach by the state in sterilizing poor and vulnerable migrant women. Our belief in the sanctity of human life, our faith in humanity, and, above all, our future depend on it.