Remembering Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. An extraordinary and tireless champion of justice, someone that “help[ed] repair tears in [our] society” and move the country forward.
It hurt my eyes and soul when I saw the news offorced sterilizationsof migrant women conducted by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). We learned about this thanks toDawn Wooten, a brave Black nurse working at an ICE facility in Georgia who recently filed a whistleblower complaint reporting horrendous medical practices against immigrants.
This is not the first, second or even third time that Black, Brown, poor, Indigenous and incarcerated people have been subject to unethical, invasive medical procedures without their explicit consent. The United States has a long history of forced medical procedures and experimentations on people of color and persons with physical and mental disabilities based oneugenics, a collection of pseudo-scientific ideas about the supposed physical and moral strengths and weaknesses inherent in a person’s race or ethnic origin.
As repulsive as these sound today and as much as they may evoke the monstrous human experiments conducted by the Third Reich, these ideas and practices wereinspired by and embedded inmainstream scientists and scientific societies in the early 20th世纪在美国。往下的基石h ideas was and still is codified inpopulation controlprograms via forced sterilization of women and men.
There is never any moral or practical justification for coerced sterilization.We cannotlet this happen again. The following “ABC” ofracism in scienceandlaw enforcementis a sobering reminder of just a few moments in history. Enough is enough!
Caveat:The alphabet isn’t enough to describe the horror.
A is for Arbitrary detentions.Thousands of asylum seekersfleeing persecution, torture, or death in their countries of origin have been locked up behind bars indefinitely without due process. According to theAmerican Civil Liberties Union(ACLU), this practice “violates the Constitution, breaks U.S. immigration and international laws, and goes against the Department of Homeland Security’s written policy.”
B is for Black women.From the time of slavery to the present day, the reproductive rights of Black women have been heavily regulated. InKilling the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts exposes America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies, which spans from slave masters’ taking financial advantage of women’s fertility so that children could be owned and sold at their masters discretion’, to being sterilized as recently as nowadays.
C is for California.Prisons in California are said to have authorized thesterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010．Inmates, the majority of which were Black and Latinas, have said these were done under coercion. The state of California is also infamous for having conducted the largest number of sterilizations in the country (20,000between 1909 and 1979).
D is for Davenport– Dr. Charles Davenport—a biologist at the University of Chicago—and his collaborator Dr. Henry Laughlin led theEugenics Records Office(ERO) research agenda with support and funding from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)’sScience journaland theCarnegie Institution．
E is for Eugenicist practices:In 1914, Harry Laughlin publishedthe Model Eugenical Sterilization Lawaiming to authorize the sterilization of the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, criminals and people of color. This was used to codify the sterilization of women in 30 U.S. states and Puerto Rico.
Eugenical Sterilization Map of the United States, 1935; from The Harry H. Laughlin Papers, Truman State University
F is for Forced sterilizations.It is estimated that70,000 womenwere subject to forced sterilizations during the 20thcentury in the U.S.
G is for Guatemala.From 1946 to 1948 theU.S. Public Health Service deliberately infectedorphans, inmates, psychiatric patients and prostitutes with sexually transmitted diseases to determine what drugs worked best in stopping the diseases.
H is for Haiti:Haitian families make up 44 percent of families in ICE concentration camps. The narrative about asylum seekers should account for Black immigrants and the specific challenges they face. For example,bail bonds for Haitian families are much higherthan for other immigrants causing longer periods in custody.
Almost half of the families currently locked up by ICE are Haitian
I is for India．In 1975 more thansix million peoplewere sterilized when the Prime Minister suspended civil liberties in a “national emergency.” India’s ambitious population control program was encouraged by loans from the World Bank, the Swedish International Development Authority, and the United Nations Population Fund.
J is for Juvenile detention centers．At least threeof ICE’s juvenile detention facilities have been accused of mistreating kids, with one of those even been cited by Pennsylvania’s regulators for “alleged sexual harassment and sexual abuse, as well as excessive use of force to restrain children.”
K is for Kids separated from their families.Since 2017, more than5,000 childrenhave been separated from their families by the current administration.
The Women Disobey protest against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) “zero tolerance” policy separation children and families at the US/Mexico border.
L is for Language.Immigrants with limited English proficiency face additional barriers to be able to navigate the immigration process, seek legal counsel, get proper medical assistance, and make informed choices. This can even have life-threatening implications; such was the case that resulted in thedeaths of two childrenfrom Indigenous Mayan communities under ICE custody in 2018. AlthoughExecutive Order 12166requires ICE to provide translated materials and contract interpreters, in reality, budget constraints and remote locations are being used to justify other alternatives (if any) such as the use of video services that oftenfail due to poor Internet connectivity．
M is for Mexican immigrant women.The documentaryNo Más Bebésby Renee Tajima-Peña tells the story of Mexican immigrant women who were permanently sterilized without informed consent or under duress after going to a Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center hospital in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A class-action suit against the hospital,Madrigal v. Quilligan, was unsuccessful but served to better inform consent for patients.
Native American women.With the passing of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, close to25 percent of Native American womenof childbearing age were sterilized.
Outdated laws．To this day,U.S. law still allows forced sterilizationof anyone deemed “unfit.” (see “V”)
Puerto Rico.In 1939, a law institutionalized the population control program. Over the next 40 years, close toone-third of Puerto Rican women were sterilized, the highest rate of sterilization in the world.
Q is for Queer Rights.The rights of queer persons are also violated by anti-scientific discrimination. According to the Georgetown Law Library, historically, those who “strayed from the traditional gender roles assigned at birth were often characterized as mentally defective or psychopaths. Treatments for individuals exhibiting these traits varied from sterilization and castration to lobotomies and conversion therapy.”
R is for both Racism and Racial Hygiene．Population control via forced sterilizations was used by Adolf Hitler’s regime to advance his unscientific views on race. “Racial hygiene”, for example, refers to the abominable practice of controlling population growth of a particular race to eliminate “undesirable” characteristics such as physical malformations, genetic deafness, epilepsy, or blindness. This was carried out by scientists in Nazi Germany, and they took a cue or two from the research conducted by the Eugenics Records Office in the United States, which was funded by leading American scientific societies (see “E”).
S is for Surgical Sterilization.In 2019, the government of Japan upheld alaw that requires that transgender persons who wish to obtain legal recognition of their gender identity must submit to surgical sterilization.In addition to being a cruel practice based on the falsehood that transgender persons are mentally ill, the requirement violates Japan’s human rights obligations and is in opposition to international medical standards.
Tuskegee.More than600 Black men unwittingly participated in an experimentby the U.S. Public Health Service to examine the effects of untreated syphilis from 1932 to 1972. The men were thought that they were going to be treated for “bad blood” but in reality, no proper treatment to cure them was provided.
United States.Systematic forced sterilization is a Crime against Humanity．However, the International Criminal Court does not have universal jurisdiction and the U.S. is one of the few countries to exclude itself.
V is for Virginia.In 1924, the Commonwealth of Virginia authorized the compulsory sterilization of the intellectually disabled. TheBuck v. Bellcase was the result of an effort by eugenicist that wanted to see if the law was constitutional. In 1927 the US Supreme Court decided that states may sterilize inmates of public institutions setting a nefarious legal precedent, and resulted in the sterilization ofCarrie Buck, a poor White woman who was raped by a relative of her foster family.
W is for Wooten.黎明Wooten是一个护士在一个冰facili工作ty in Georgia. She filed a whistleblower complaint alleging high rates of hysterectomies at the facility without detainee’s informed consent, as well as unsafe work conditions to face COVID-19. She’s being represented by theGovernment Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection organization, andProject South, a social justice advocacy group.
X is for Xenophobia.Xenophobiaand racism have spread like a virus with the arrival of COVID-19. The use of anti-Chinese rhetoric to refer to the pandemic origins in Wuhan, China has fueledAnti-Asian discrimination and harassmentraging from microaggressions to violent physical attacks. We’re in the middle of a fight against the coronavirus disease and should support each other instead of stigmatizing people by attaching locations or ethnicity to the disease. “We can better prevent the spread of COVID-19 and protect those who may have it when we speak about it with accuracy, empathy, and care — something we should all be committed to.”
Y is for Youth.There are records of girls as young as 12 years old being sterilized without their consent. TheRelf v. Weinbergercase brought light to the story of two poor Black women in the South, Minnie and Mary Alice Relf, who were sterilized at the ages of 12 and 14. Their mother was illiterate and signed with an X a paper thinking that her daughters were going to receive birth control shots. In reality, the girls were surgically sterilized. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Relf sisters uncovering thewide-spread sterilization abuse funded by the federal government and practiced for decades．由于诉讼,联邦资金ot be used for coerced or forced sterilizations, and informed consent is required before performing sterilization procedures.
Z is for Zero humanity and dignity.Overcrowded concentration camps with frigid temperatures and deplorable conditions; force-feeding; families torn apart; abuse and mistreatment under ICE custody including forced sterilizations and even deaths: “ICE is rotten to the core．”
What Dawn Wooten is denouncing just adds to a long list of human rights violations committed by ICE and an even longer history of women reproductive rights injustices.Let’s not repeat history’s mistakes!
Add your namehereif you want to speak up and speak out against this latest atrocity, and make a commitment to dismantle and rebuild every system that causes harm to our bodies, our families, and our communities.
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Note:Thanks to my colleaguesJuan Declet-Barretofor his input andCamilo Esquivia-Zapatafor ensuring that we can also share this blog in Spanish (soon to be uploaded).