Originally Published in CNN
Opinion by Allison Hope - September 17, 2020

The Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, is seen in February 2018.
(CNN)In 1961, famed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer's uterus was removed by a White doctor without her consent while she was undergoing surgery to remove a tumor. Sterilization of Black women was so common at the time that the practice was dubbed a "Mississippi appendectomy."
In 2018, a county hospital in Los Angeles apologized for 200 sterilizations of women in the 1960s and 1970s who delivered babies and who, because of language and cultural barriers, may not have understood what was happening or have given consent. According to Alexandra Minna Stern, a professor at the University of Michigan, eugenics sterilization laws on the books in many states until the 1970s resulted in about 60,000 people being sterilized in procedures that "we would qualify today as being compulsory, forced, involuntary, and under the justifications that the people who were being sterilized were unfit to reproduce."
Wooten's allegations are similar to others that have surfaced at ICE facilities, according to lawyers, court documents and other whistleblowers. Some of these allegations include a lack of social distancing, transfers of detainees despite heightened risk of virus transmission and spread, and attempts to treat Covid-19 symptoms with over-the-counter cold medication.
House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi was emphatic: "The allegations put forth in this whistleblower complaint point to an alarming pattern of unsafe conditions and a lack of oversight at privately-run ICE facilities," he said in a statement, calling the allegations of hysterectomies being performed on women without consent "incredibly disturbing."
If these allegations are true, we are financing both medical neglect during a global pandemic and paying for so-called medical professionals to perform potentially unnecessary and non-consensual invasive surgeries that remove a woman's ability to reproduce. Democratic leaders have called for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to conduct an immediate and thorough investigation, but as it stands, a veil of protection and secrecy around DHS and federally-run ICE facilities practices remains. It desperately needs to be lifted.
Leave a Reply