By: Shiksha Sneha, W*SS Intern
About a month ago, Dawn Wooten, a Black woman and a nurse, became a whistleblower when she filed a complaint stating that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was conducting mass and non-consensual hysterectomies on detained immigrant women in Georgia (link). While horrifying, this is not a new phenomenon, and, in fact, is reminiscent of the United States’ long history of sterilizing vulnerable Black, Indigenous, and Latinx women without their consent.
In Buck v. Bell (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a state has the right to sterilize someone against their will if they determine that person to be unfit. This ruling resulted in the United States forcibly sterilizing 70,000 women. Among those, the majority were Black, disabled, or poor. States also targeted women who they deemed to be too “promiscuous.” Often, the women didn’t even know they were being sterilized and that their government had decided that they didn’t deserve to be mothers.
A similar rhetoric in Puerto Rico, pushed by the U.S. government, resulted in the sterilization of one-third of the female population from 1930 to 1970. To combat poverty and overpopulation, the United States sent in health officials to rural parts of Puerto Rico to advocate for sterilization. U.S. pharmaceutical companies used Puerto Rican women as test subjects for their birth control pills. Many weren’t told what was being done to them and many had their husbands or doctors force the sterilization on them. These women didn’t have a choice over this very permanent and significant decision.
These are just two of several incidents where an American institution has tried to control bodies of color. From the 40 year long Tuskegee Experiment that targeted Black men (link) to a California prison in 2013 that sterilized 148 women without their consent (link), the government has had a history of stripping people of their autonomy and experimenting with their lives. The current actions of ICE is despicable and a clear human rights violation that further shows the prevalence of white supremacy and xenophobia in America today.
To learn more about the various incidents mentioned here, check out these links:
Indigenous women and forceful sterilization
Sterilization in prisons
Buck v. Bell
The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced Sterilizations
Image above from Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/evangelical-leaders-outraged-over-reports-of-immigrant-sterilization-2020-9
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