More than a Procedure for Women?
Women coming out of the hospital after a routine surgical procedure only to discover they were sterilized as part of the process.
Imagine you, as an American citizen, went to the hospital for a fairly common surgical procedure such as an appendectomy, only to find that you have been sterilized afterward as part of the process. Even in the 20th century, countless numbers of women of color have been wrongly led into something they unknowingly agreed to undergo. As a result of medical racism, life-altering experiences such as sterilization especially for women of color were more prominent than believed. African-American, Native American, and Puerto Rican women have reported that they have been sterilized without their consent. What makes many of these occurrences traumatic for these women is that not only was it without their consent but that it happens after going through routine medical procedures or, ironically, after giving birth. This leads to a lot of distrust between the communities of color, especially women, and healthcare personnel. Even though believed to be discontinued, forced sterilization among women of color in the United States still seems to be an issue.
Women deemed inferior or dangerous as a result of their color ended up becoming a victim to such a cruel and inhumane practice known as sterilization abuse. As a commonly accepted means of allegedly protecting society, eugenics was supported and sterilization abuse became prevalent. The predominant fear of the inheritance of traits associated with panoply of conditions such as criminality, feeble mindedness, and sexual deviance also led to the legalization of this against people especially women of color. Serving as common tools, misinformation and miscommunication play a role in deceiving victims, which are more than often women of color, to obtain their consent to the procedure. Reassurance that the procedure is temporary or reversible is often a lie fed to many of these women. Though it is true that it can be reversed by reconnecting the fallopian tubes, it does not necessarily mean fertility will be restored so that she can be pregnant again which technically means that she is still sterilized.
Beginning in 1909 and apparently only continuing for 70 years, California led the country in the number of sterilization procedures which was often done without the victims’ full knowledge and or consent. Aside from California, where at least a third of total procedures were executed, the remaining two-thirds can be accredited to the 32 other states that also had this action legalized. As if not surprising or upsetting enough, the eugenics program has even inspired the Nazis during Hitler’s rise in Germany with his goal of purification. Though improving the human species through selective breeding, which include the high possibility of preventing habitual criminals, may seem as an innocent goal in itself, it really is not as the process of sterilization as a part of it revolves around racism and especially among women of color.
Information released by the Center for Investigative Reporting has shed light on the brutal fact that dozens of female inmates in California had been illegally sterilized in recent years. If unwanted and not fully understood by the patient or victim, then that choice against sterilization should be respected as a right held by everyone including women. Though supposedly discontinued in the United States, it is still a procedure that seems to be forced on many living in today’s world. This very recent case of sterilization abuse among female inmates serves as a salient reminder that though it is seen as a tragic-but-past occurrence, it still exists. Though it began over a century ago, it seems to still live on a procedure illegally forced on women.
Two fifteen-year-old Native American women went into the hospital for tonsillectomies and came out with tubal ligations. Another Native American woman requested a “womb transplant,” only to reveal that she had been told that was an option after her uterus had been removed against her will. Cheyenne women had their Fallopian tubes severed, sometimes after being told that they could be “untied” again.
For many, America’s history of brutal experimentation on people of color is perhaps best summed up by the Tuskegee Experiment, in which doctors let African-American men suffer from syphilis over a period of 40 years. But another medical outrage is less well-known. Jane Lawrence documents the forced sterlization of thousands of Native American women by the Indian Health Service in the 1960s and 1970s — procedures thought to have been performed on one out of every four Native American women at the time, against their knowledge or consent.
As shown in personal accounts from real vicitims, Native American women, too, as women of color, have been subjected to such heinous abuse. According to a Cherokee intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist Andrea Smith in her Article “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy Rethinking Women of Color Organizing”, some people argue that Native people suffer less racism than other people of color because they generally do not reside in segregated neighborhoods within the United States. This is just not true as they as women of color, too, have experienced this racism firsthand.
Historically subjected to coordinated efforts to control women of color’s fertility, women do not deserve to have their reproductive rights stripped from them. They deserve to know every detail to the process before being coerced and deceived to give consent to a process that may or may not be easily reversible. Sterilization abuse should not be a practice that continues to exist in the modern and civilized nation such as the United States.
