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.