Originally Published in CNN
Catherine E. Shoichet - September 16, 2020

Demonstrators march outside at the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center in 1974 at a protest organized by "The Committee to Stop Forced Sterilization."
(CNN) Natalia Molina was shocked when she heard a whistleblower's allegations about hysterectomies in ICE custody. But also, she wasn't.
Molina has written about the history of forced sterilization. The professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California knows there's a shameful legacy of US officials ordering operations on people without their consent -- often disproportionately targeting people of color -- with laws driven by racism and cloaked in terms about mental health and fitness.
So when new allegations emerged about conditions in ICE custody, she says, it wasn't hard to make a connection.
"The story gained so much traction immediately with people, because there's such a long history affecting many different racial and ethnic groups, across many institutions -- mental health hospitals, public hospitals, prisons," she says.
In a complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, a nurse who worked at Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia reported concerns about a high rate of hysterectomies and alleged medical neglect there. Lawmakers are calling for an investigation and ICE is urging skepticism of what it calls "anonymous, unproven allegations."
As details emerge, Molina and other scholars say they see this week's allegations as the latest chapter in a long and troubling history.
The history of forced sterilization in the US dates back more than a century
"This could be seen as a recent episode in a much longer trajectory of sterilization abuse and reproductive injustice," says Alexandra Minna Stern, a professor and associate dean at the University of Michigan.
Indiana passed the world's first eugenics sterilization law in 1907. And from there, Stern says, 31 other US states followed suit.
"Under those laws, about 60,000 people were 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," she says.
The laws, which led to officials ordering sterilizations of people they deemed "feeble-minded" or "mentally defective," later became models for Nazi Germany.
Stern directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, a project that's dedicated to reconstructing stories behind the sterilizations that occurred across the US.
"Women and people of color increasingly became the target, as eugenics amplified sexism and racism," Stern wrote in a recent article for The Conversation detailing the lab's research.
Patterns varied from state to state, Stern says. In California, people of Mexican descent were disproportionately sterilized. And in North Carolina, Black women were disproportionately targeted.
Most of the state laws were repealed by the 1970s. But their history is something scholars are still working to unravel and states are still reckoning with.
Leave a Reply