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From 1930 through the 1970s, when contraception and abortion were illegal in most states, federal and state government agencies launched a eugenics campaign to restrict the population of people considered inferior, thus, unfit to produce children – the poor, disabled, promiscuous women, mixed race people, and women of color. In Puerto Rico and across mainland US, they instituted involuntary sterilization programs, stripping tens of thousands of women of the human right to procreate and to decide for themselves whether or not to bear children.

In the 1880s, supported by faulty science, eugenics found fertile ground in America, defining white, northern European, wealthy men as superior to everyone else, and all others as undesirable, to be controlled or eliminated. By 1932, 32 states allowed for government sterilization of the “unfit” and the “undesirable.”

During the first half of the 20th century, eugenics permeated American society, laws and policies, restricting opportunities for women and the southern and eastern European immigrants who flooded into the US from 1880-1920, as well as buttressing continued discrimination and disenfranchisement of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and Puerto Ricans.

While the exact number is unknown, it is estimated that 100,000+ women were forcibly sterilized as part of the campaign to decrease the population of women of color. Many were threatened with loss of government benefits if they refused to be sterilized; others were sterilized without their consent through trickery and deceit. To name a few:
* In Puerto Rico, by 1970, approximately 37% of women of child-bearing age had been forced to undergo a tubal ligation, without their consent or through coercion.
* In North Carolina, from 1930-1970, 7,600 people were rendered unable to have children.
* In California, by 1964, approximately 20,000 Mexican Americans and Chicanas had been sterilized.
* Across the sharecropping South, particularly in Mississippi and Alabama, from 1950-1966, in what became known as the “Mississippi appendectomy,” a hysterectomy, Black women were sterilized at 3 times the rate of white women.
* In Sunflower County, Mississippi, it’s estimated 60% of all black women were sterilized without consent, many postpartum.
* Among Native American nations, the US General Accounting Office found the Indian Health services sterilized 3,406 women from 1973-1976, while a study by Women of All Red Nations estimated the real number to be closer to 70,000 women.

Activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Connie Redbird Pinkerman-Uri, Marie Sanchez, and Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias uncovered the breadth and depth of the US sterilization programs, and forced changes in US policy and law to prevent sterilization abuse.

By 1978, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued regulations making it illegal to coerce sterilization, banning threats of the loss of government benefits, prohibiting the use of federal funds for involuntary sterilizations, requiring informed consent, mandating a 30-day waiting period, and requiring all services and information to be provided in the language spoken by the patient.

In the 21st century, the vigilance of the reproductive justice movement has uncovered sterilization abuse in California prisons among incarcerated Mexican American women, within a Georgia ICE detention center, in the Tennessee criminal justice system, and continuing among the Puerto Rican population.

Ariana González Stokas shares her story of the personal impact on her family of the US government sterilization campaign in Puerto Rico from 1930-1970, the longest and largest of its kind in the world. Watch this and more in Stand UP, Speak OUT: Episode 3-Reproductive Rights.

Kansas voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have removed the right to abortion from the State Constitution. By an 18-point margin, voters from both political parties supported women’s right to make their own reproductive choices.

“The Kansas vote implies that around 65 percent of voters nationwide would reject a similar initiative to roll back abortion rights,” says the New York Times. “Four other states have put abortion rights directly on the ballot in November with measures to amend their constitutions: California, Michigan and Vermont will ask voters whether to affirm the right to abortion, while Kentucky will ask voters whether to reject it. In other states, the outcomes of competitive races for the legislature and the governor’s mansion in November could pave the way either for protections or for restrictions and outright bans. Races further down the ballot matter, too, giving Americans more opportunities to vote on abortion, some with more lasting effects.”

Don’t skip a primary or a referendum coming up in your state. Don’t let obstacles and apathy keep you from voting. Your vote matters!

Real women tell their stories in Stand UP, Speak OUT episodes on Voting Rights and Reproductive Rights.

For those of us who were of child-bearing age before Roe v. Wade was decided, the Dobbs decision is particularly painful because of memories of our own abortions or those of women we helped obtain one. For those of you who are among the ⅔ of the U.S. who were not yet born 50 years ago, and, as the dissent in Dobbs stated, “have grown up expecting Roe’s and Casey’s protections… (T)he disruption of overturning Roe and Casey will therefore be profound…. Women may count on abortion access for when contraception fails. They may count on abortion access for when contraception cannot be used, for example, if they were raped. They may count on abortion for when something changes in the midst of a pregnancy, whether it involves family or financial circumstances, unanticipated medical complications, or heartbreaking fetal diagnoses. Taking away the right to abortion, as the majority does today, destroys all those individual plans and expectations. In so doing, it diminishes women’s opportunities to participate fully and equally in the Nation’s political, social, and economic life.”

The women who tell their abortion stories in Stand UP, Speak OUT Episode 3: Reproductive Rights know the effects of this decision all too well. They know it will subject countless women to unnecessary pain and punishment. They know, as the dissenting Justices put it: “Closing our eyes to the suffering today’s decision will impose will not make that suffering disappear.” That’s why BC Voices continues our mission to promote women’s rights by telling women’s personal stories in the context of history.

As the dissent expressed, Roe and Casey set forth how the fundamental right to abortion is a core constitutional concept of individual freedom, and of the equal rights of citizens to decide on the shape of their lives. “Those legal concepts, one might even say, have gone far toward defining what it means to be an American. For in this Nation, we do not believe that a government controlling all private choices is compatible with a free people.”

We must keep on keeping on. It’s vital that we get out the vote in 2022 to:
• Reclaim the federal judiciary
• Block any national ban on abortions and contraception
• Block any national personhood bill
• Pass the National Women’s Health Protection Act, which overturns Dobbs. Republican Senators and Senators Manchin and Sinema have thus far refused to vote for it.
And, very importantly, to vote down ballot to:
• Support the constitutional right to abortion
• Support the constitutional right to contraception
• Support the constitutional right to interstate travel
• Protect women’s ability to undergo in-vitro fertilization and treatment for miscarriage
• Refuse to criminalize women, health care providers and helpers from obtaining or providing abortions
• Refuse to prosecute crimes related to abortion

Abortion clinics and abortion provider training institutions need our donations in States where abortion is legal. In States where abortion is illegal, nonprofits need funds and volunteers to help women with transportation, lodging, and child care to secure appointments for legal abortions in other states, our generation’s Underground Railroad.

It’s a desperate time, only to get worse for women. We can and must take action to protect and defend women’s right to make their own decisions about their own bodies and lives. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1993, “This is something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity. It’s a decision that she must make for herself. And when government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices. The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality.”

Watch our Stand UP, Speak OUT docuseries to learn more about women’s history and hear from women who experienced its impact on their lives.