According to LibertadLatina.org, “Puerto Rico, a U.S. Commonwealth, has the highest percentage of sterilized women in the entire world.” The website also states that, within the continental U.S. today, Latinas as a demographic are the most frequents targets of sterilization programs: “in New York Latinas have a sterilization rate seven times higher than white women and almost twice that of Black women.”
I had never heard of forced sterilization before reading John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman’s Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. According to the Merck Manual of Medical Information, sterilization, or removing one’s ability to sexually reproduce, is achieved by “disrupting the tubes that carry sperm or the egg.” In men, sterilization consists of a vasectomy: “a short procedure, done in the doctor’s office.” For a woman’s body, sterilization is more complicated. Women who undergo a tubal ligation require both an incision in the abdomen and anesthetic. Of particular interest to those who would target vulnerable mothers: “Women who have just delivered a child can be sterilized immediately after childbirth or on the following day, without staying in the hospital any longer than usual.”
D’Emilio and Freedman write that in the 1970s, “it came to light that in Aiken, South Carolina, the only doctor willing to deliver babies of welfare recipients required that mothers of more than two children first agree to sterilization” (315). Forced sterilization of poor women and other minorities has been and still is a serious social problem and a human rights violation of those whose reproductive labors are deemed social ills by doctors and government authorities.
To this point, the authors continue: “In 1973, the National Abortion Action Coalition revealed that fourteen states were debating legislation designed to coerce women on welfare to undergo sterilization. As the sponsor of one such bill declared, ‘People who live like animals should be treated as such’” (315). Though much of this legislation has since been overturned, the United States was the forerunner in developing compulsory sterilization methods and other means of population control in a eugenics movement designed to “purify” its citizenry.
In her essay, “Dark Chapter of American History: U.S. Court Battle Over Forced Sterilization,” (2000), Christa Piotrowski writes that those who masterminded the so-called science of eugenics, “advocated keeping the “Anglo-American race” pure.” Purity would require the prevention of “‘inferior’ people of allegedly poor genetic stock” from reproducing. Along with welfare recipients, those with “poor genetic stock” included: black, native, and hispanic Americans, “‘morally and intellecutally inferior’ immigrants from eastern and southern Europe,” and those unfortunate enough to be defined “epilectics, manic-depressives, prostitutes, alcoholics, the homeless and criminals.” Eugenicists’ belief, as summarized by the words of President Calvin Coolidge at the signing of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, was this: “America must remain American.” Apparently, their America was not constituted by, or did not have room for, those persons who were not healthy, wealthy, and white.
The practice of forced sterilization, in whatever guise or tool employed, is troubling. The violation of one’s body without one’s consent or complete understanding is troubling. The power elected authorities and dominant insitutions have to regulate life and remake society in accordance with their own ideal images is troubling. What is also troubling, though, is the possibility that the promotion of sterilization arises from legitimate concerns. Who should take responsibility for children born to parents who don’t have the social, emotional, or financial resources to take care of them? Who gets to determine that they do indeed lack these resources? Why do those who do lack such resources lack them in the first place? Is it pragmatic to attempt to deal with a problem whose roots are deep and widespread by simply snipping off troubling outgrowths, or is inane and horrific? Any thoughts???
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