Lots of biology teachers show their students this map in their classes. I’m one of them. The US has an ugly history of involuntary sterilization, using the excuse of eugenics. Personally, I like to point out that our progressive state of Minnesota sterilized over a thousand unwilling people, all in the name of helping society.
But that’s from 1935! We don’t do that anymore, right?
The state of California had to pass a law to compensate all the women they have sterilized in the last decade. Now they’re squirming to avoid paying out.
Pressure from advocates for incarcerated people and investigative reporting pushed California officials to take action in recent years. In 2021 state lawmakers passed a reparations program to provide $35,000 to each person who was involuntarily sterilized while in state custody.
But that program has compensated only a fraction of the around 800 women identified by a state audit who underwent procedures that could have resulted in sterilization while imprisoned between 2005 and 2013; that state audit also found that prison doctors regularly violated the consent process for such procedures during that time. As of June, the California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB), the body tasked with determining who gets reparations under the program, has approved compensation for roughly 120 of those survivors, according to documents from the board.
How do you sterilize 800 people against their will by accident? This would be grounds for massive malpractice suits, except that it happened in prisons.
In 2014, the California State Auditor found many violations of the consent process leading up to the sterilization procedures, including physicians failing to sign documents certifying that the women “appeared mentally competent and understood the lasting effects of the procedure.” They also found that the sterilizations were not always reported if they were conducted alongside another procedure, such as a woman giving birth.
The audit also found that the majority of women who were sterilized were between the ages of 26 and 35, and most had a high school reading level. Of the women who received a tubal ligation procedure, which blocks or removes fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy (one of the only procedures the compensation board previously deemed eligible for reparations), between 2005 and 2013, 50 were white, 47 were Hispanic, and 35 were Black. For most, it was their first time being incarcerated.
So a woman gives birth, and the prison doctor goes back in and scrapes out her endometrium? That’s unjustified and should be treated as criminal behavior.
Don’t worry. Some of the doctors have a perfectly good excuse — they were doing these women a favor.
The news outlet also interviewed an OB-GYN at Valley State Prison, James Heinrich, who claimed he was providing an important service to poor women. “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for those unwanted children—as they procreated more,” he said in 2013.
“Heinrich”? Really? Did he have to have such a German name? Regardless of nationality, doctors should never carry out a medical procedure without informed consent, that the patient does not want, because they think they know what’s best.