By Linda Villarosa, published in the New York Times on June 8, 2022
Introduction:
Periodically, I read about eugenics, the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding” which gained popularity during the early 20th century. Eugenicists worldwide believed that they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity.
In America, there are 1000’s of living victims of sterilization.
In 1927, in a decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Court (8-1) upheld that the State had the right to sterilize the unfit, the intellectually disabled “for the protection of the health of the state.”
The eugenics movement became associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust when the defense of many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials of 1945 to 1946 attempted to justify their human-rights abuses by claiming there was little difference between the Nazi eugenics programs and the U.S. eugenics programs. In the decades following World War II, with more emphasis on human rights, many countries began to abandon eugenics policies, although some Western countries (the United States, Canada, and Sweden among them) continued to carry out forced sterilizations.
Until reading this article in the New York Times, I did not realize that forced sterilizations by state governments had continued into the 21st century. Federal programs in the 1960’s and 1970’s promoted sterilization under the guise of “planned parenthood.”
Sterilization involves two forms of harm, the physical harm to one’s reproductive autonomy and the moral stigma associated with sterilization, including the suggestion that you are unworthy to reproduce.
As of today, only three states have compensated women who were sterilized. There is pressure on the remaining 29 states and the federal government to compensate sterilized women.
Excerpt of the Article
“From 1907 to 1932, 32 states passed explicit eugenic laws that allowed the sterilization of the “insane, the feebleminded, the dependent, and the diseased.” Nearly all of these laws have been repealed. Eight states have issued official apologies.”
Dr. Alexandra Minna Stern, a professor of American history and culture at the University of Michigan and co-director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab studies the history of eugenic sterilization in the United States. She and her research team have collected the records of more than 60,000 survivors in California, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina and Utah. “We’re talking about sterilizing populations that are being seen as hypersexualized or as sexually inappropriate, as promiscuous, as not having middle-class sexual respectability.”
Sterilization took place in the ‘40s, 50s, ‘60s, and beyond as a population-control measure. The practice of being sterilized, including during unrelated surgery, grew so common among poor Black women in the South that it came to be known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
A program administered through the Office of Economic Opportunity, established in 1964 as part of the U.S. government’s war on poverty, was used to promote sterilization. In 1967, the U.S. government created its “family-planning program” to help poor people prevent unwanted births through contraception and other reproductive health services. Under President Johnson and Nixon, the federal government funneled money into family-planning programs(sterilization). These facilities were twisted by racial and eugenic logics and pre-existing, longstanding racism and disempowerment of Black mothers and Black girls.
The article highlighted that there was a pattern of sterilization abuse, financed by the U.S. government and practiced for decades.
In North Carolina, doctors performed some 7,600 sterilizations between 1929 and 1974. They were justified as a way to keep welfare rolls low, reduce poverty and improve the gene pool by preventing the “mentally deficient” from reproducing; the victims were disproportionately Black women and Native American women.
In California, more than 17,000 were sterilized between 1920 and 1945 under a state eugenics law used to prevent reproduction of those deemed “unfit”; a disproportionate number were women of Mexican descent. In 1976, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that between 1973 and 1976, four of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 Native American women without their permission, including three dozen who were under 21. In California nearly 150 female inmates were sterilized from 2006-2010 without required state approvals.
Also in 1976, Health, Education and Welfare, reported that over 37 percent of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age, most in their 20s, were sterilized between the 1930s and the 1970s. The U.S. government had taken an active role in population control beginning in 1898, when it assumed governance of Puerto Rico, on the supposed grounds that overpopulation would increase poverty and other social and economic conditions.
