On December 9, 1948, in response to the genocidal practice in the Nazi occupied territories, the United Nations General Assembly adopted U.N. Resolution 260 (III). This resolution criminalized genocide, defined by the U.N. as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Article 2 of this resolution includes, “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”[1] Disregarding this resolution, governmental and private sectors within the U.S. instituted sterilization and birth practices with the intent to prevent the births of non-white people.
As early as 1945, U.S. Representative Jed Johnson proposed that the U.S. government sterilize all Japanese Americans, who were at that time in internment camps. In her book American Eugenics, Nancy Ordover writes, “Johnson’s remarks . . . dispel the myth that there was restraint on the part of [U.S] eugenicists and sterilization advocates as revelations of Nazi atrocities begin to surface.”[2] In fact, in 1981 the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians revealed that in 1943, the U.S. government sterilized interned Japanese Americans.[3]
In
1961, Fanny Lou Hamer went to a Mississippi hospital to have a tumor removed
and while she was recovering, discovered that the doctors had sterilized
her. She had no recourse. She was not the only one. In 1965, in North Carolina a caseworker
coerced Nial Ruth Cox, a young African American woman, into sterilization with
the threat that her family would lose their welfare payments if she refused.[4] In 1973, a South Carolina obstetrician
coerced Mrs. Virgil Walker into sterilization threatening to deny her medical
services. He was the only obstetrician
in her small town.[5]
In June 1973, in Montgomery, Alabama two
young sisters Mary Alice Relf, aged 12 and Minnie Relf, aged 14 were getting a
checkup at the Family Planning Clinic of the Montgomery Community Action
Committee. The clinic staff convinced
their mother consent to having the girls injected with the birth control,
Depo-Provera. Mrs. Relf, who could not
read, signed with an X. She had
actually had consented to having her two daughters sterilized.[6] The subsequent law suit, Relf v.
Weinberger, resulted in the uncovering of more than 100,000 federally
funded involuntary sterilizations. Half
of the women sterilized were black.[7]
African American women were not the only
women of color subjected to involuntary sterilizations. In the 1970s, there were massive
sterilizations of Native American women by federally funded Indian Health
Services doctors. The doctors had no guidelines for sterilization and had an
economic incentive to perform as many as possible. These doctors did not provide women with an understanding of the
pros and cons of the procedure. Thus,
the sterilization of Navaho women increased 300% in the 1970s.[8] The 1975 case Madrigal v. Quilligan
challenged the state sterilization of Spanish speaking Mexican women who
medical personnel coerced into signing English language forms that they could
not read.[9]
[1] Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 199.
[2] Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 160.
[3] Ibid., 160-161.
[4] Ibid., 166-167.
[5] Ibid., 167.
[6] Ibid., 169.
[7] Washington, Medical Apartheid, 204.
[8] Mondana Nikoukari, “Gradations of Coercion: The Plight of Women of Color and Their Informed Consent in the Sterilization Debate,” Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal vol. 1, no. 1 (2001): 59.
[9] Ibid., 60.