The United States has a long history of forced sterilization, experimentation, and reproductive coercion. J. Marion Sims, known as the “father of modern gynecology,” performed countless surgeries on enslaved women without anesthesia. Starting in the late 1800s, the eugenics movement advocated for the compulsory sterilization of the “feeble-minded,” preferentially sterilizing poor people and people of color. In the 1950s, the first large-scale human trial of contraceptive pills was conducted in a public housing project in Puerto Rico. From 1970 to 1976 alone, between 25 and 50 percent of Native American women were sterilized, often without their consent. These are but a few of the abuses carried out against women of color in the United States. Numerous legal cases in the 1970s and 80s resulted in protections, but studies continue to find cases of ongoing coercion.
Breaking News
A whistleblower alleges coerced sterilizations in ICE detention. Read more about it and the history of forced sterilization in this CNN article: In a horrifying history of forced sterilizations, some fear the US is beginning a new chapter.
Check out Structures & Self: Advancing Equity and Justice in Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare. It is a learner-led, justice-informed curriculum designed to teach clinical learners to consider how systems of power and legacies of structural oppression impact their care for patients. Learners will consider how to leverage their privilege to create change on a clinical, community, and systemic level.
Above is one of the videos they have created. It focuses on the history of oppression in the field of family planning and how it contributes to current health inequities in sexual and reproductive health.
“In most major teaching hospitals in New York City, it is the unwritten policy to do elective hysterectomies on poor Black and Puerto Rican women, with minimal indications, to train residents.”
Check out this 2 minute overview of the history of reproductive coercion in the United States.
Reproductive (In)justice — Two Patients with Avoidable Poor Reproductive Outcomes
After a stillbirth, a California woman with an opioid use disorder hears clinicians questioning her fitness for reproduction. During a cesarean delivery, a Romani woman in Czechoslovakia is unwittingly sterilized. What can be done to correct such reproductive injustice?
Teaching Module
Non-directive pregnancy options counseling
This online module and validated OSCE provide a valued opportunity for learners to practice non-directive pregnancy options counseling skills, including screening for intimate partner violence and reproductive coercion, engagement in self-assessment and receiving feedback, and engaging in personal values clarification.
Documentaries
Belly of the Beast tells the story of a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer who discover a pattern of illegal sterilizations in California’s women’s prisons. They waged a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. With a growing team of investigators inside prison working with colleagues on the outside, they uncover a series of statewide crimes - from inadequate health care to sexual assault to coercive sterilizations - primarily targeting women of color. This shocking legal drama captured over 7-years features extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people, demanding attention to a shameful and ongoing legacy of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States.
Check out the numerous screenings available online during October and November 2021.
Elaine, Ann, and Willis are three out of approximately 8000 victims of forced sterilizations sanctioned by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina from the 1920s to the 1970s. Falsely accused of feeble-mindedness, promiscuity and being a burden on society they were sterilized without their knowledge.
Instructors guide - from Wake Forest University
Student discussion guide - from Wake Forest University
No Más Bebés tells the story of a little little-known but landmark event in women's history and reproductive rights, when a small group of Mexican immigrant mothers and activists sued county doctors, the state, and the U.S. government after they were sterilized while giving birth at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Guide & provider discussion questions on pgs 23-25 available from Chicken & Egg Pictures.
The powerful and shocking documentary Amá (Navajo for Mother) from Lorna Tucker exposes the forced sterilisation of thousands of Native American women by the USA Government.
Made alongside a group of incredible Native producers, consultants and the survivors themselves, Tucker travels across some of the loneliest parts of the USA meeting the brave survivors, doctors, politicians and whistle-blowers who have brought to light this horrifying scandal.
La Operación is a 1982 forty-minute documentary film by Ana María García about US-imposed sterilization policies resulting in the mass sterilization of Puerto Rican women during the 1950s and 1960s. Garcia blends interviews with women of different ethnic and class backgrounds who have gone through the sterilization process. So common was the use of this surgical method of sterilization that the procedure was simply known as "la operación".
Books
In Killing the Black Body, Northwestern University professor Dorothy Roberts exposes America's systemic abuse of Black women's bodies, from slave masters' economic stake in bonded women's fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s.
Reproductive Justice is a first-of-its-kind primer that provides a comprehensive yet succinct description of the field. Written by two legendary scholar-activists, Reproductive Justice introduces students to an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender politics.
Prominent Native American studies scholar and activist Andrea Smith reveals the connections between different forms of violence—perpetrated by the state and by society at large—and documents their impact on Native women in her book Conquest. In this incisive and stunningly comprehensive work, we learn how the proliferation of sexual violence as a normalized feature of modern Euro-American patriarchies is inseparable from violence against Indigenous women, and women of color.
In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies." Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.
Undivided Rights captures the evolving and largely unknown activist history of women of color organizing for reproductive justice—on their own behalf. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies. Undivided Rights shows how women of color—-starting within their own Latina, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities—have resisted coercion of their reproductive abilities. Projected against the backdrop of the mainstream pro-choice movement and radical right agendas, these dynamic case studies feature the groundbreaking work being done by health and reproductive rights organizations led by women-of-color.
With a new prologue by the author, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs is an important gateway into the controversial topic of population for students, activists, researchers and policymakers. It challenges the myth of overpopulation, uncovering the deeper roots of poverty, environmental degradation and gender inequalities. With vivid case studies, it explores how population control programs came to be promoted by powerful governments, foundations and international agencies as an instrument of Cold War development and security policy. Mainly targeting poor women, these programs were designed to drive down birth rates as rapidly and cheaply as possible, with coercion often a matter of course. In the war on population growth, birth control was deployed as a weapon, rather than as a tool of reproductive choice.
Implicit bias & Racism in Family PLanning
Excellent article by Dr. Andrea Jackson about the complicated history of racism in the family planning community. Dr. Jackson briefly reviews the history of unethical medical recommendations, the pervasiveness of unconscious bias, as well as suggestions for improving this field and moving forward.
ACOG COmmittee opinion on sterilization
This Committee Opinion reviews ethical issues related to the sterilization of women and outlines an approach to providing permanent sterilization within a reproductive justice framework that recognizes that all women have a right to pursue and to prevent pregnancy.
Presentations
Rapid review of what is meant by Reproductive Justice.
Co-hosted by SisterSong and RHEDI, this webinar on Reproductive Justice will provide an introduction to the Reproductive Justice framework and its core principles; a brief history of reproductive oppression; and a deeper understanding of intersectionality. We hope this webinar will help generate ideas for how to apply the Reproductive Justice framework to patient care and resident training.
Deirdre Cooper Owens, an Associate Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY and the Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, presents a talk titled "Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology" at UC Berkeley on Feb. 21, 2020.
This presentation, "The Legacy of American Eugenics: Buck v. Bell in the Supreme Court", was given by Dr. Paul Lombardo as the keynote address for the opening reception of the Holocaust Memorial Museum Exhibit "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race". Dr. Lombardo discussed details of the Buck case, and how it became one of the symbolic high points for the eugenic movement in the United States.
Podcasts
Radiolab podcast episode from July 17, 2019, “G: Unfit.” While this episode unfortunately doesn’t address how eugenics was racialized, it does talk about how forced sterilization has been used in the US and shows how this history isn’t all in the past.
When a law student named Mark Bold came across a Supreme Court decision from the 1920s that allowed for the forced sterilization of people deemed “unfit,” he was shocked to discover that it had never been overturned. His law professors told him the case, Buck v Bell, was nothing to worry about, that the ruling was in a kind of legal limbo and could never be used against people. But he didn’t buy it. In this episode we follow Mark on a journey to one of the darkest consequences of humanity’s attempts to measure the human mind and put people in boxes, following him through history, science fiction and a version of eugenics that’s still very much alive today, and watch as he crusades to restore a dash of moral order to the universe.
These episodes from Dig: A History Podcast review history relevant to race and women’s reproductive rights in America: