Chelsie Salvatera is a sociology major on a pre-medical track at Grinnell College. She currently holds leadership positions in several campus organizations: Sociology Student Educational Policy Committee, Philippine United Student Organization and the Young Gifted and Black Gospel choir. Her professional interests include medicine and public health, specifically minority health and health disparities in the U.S.
When the words “forced sterilization” come up in conversation, we tend immediately to think of an inhumane and disturbing procedure that took place many decades ago. More specifically, between 1909 and 1964 during the eugenics movement, 20,000 men and women from California were sterilized forcibly. This movement in the United States was one implemented to “better” or “improve” the genetic characteristics of society through the process of sterilization and breeding. American eugenicists sterilized those whom they thought “unfit” or biologically defective and who theoretically might bring financial burdens to the state due to their mental, physical, or behavioral problems. Due to this movement’s aim to preserve white, native-born Americans’ social, economic, and political power, poor, disabled, and women of color became the targets for coerced sterilization [1].
Unfortunately, a severe concern about forced sterilizations remains relevant even today. A report from The Center for Investigative Reporting documents, from 2006 through 2010, sterilizations of 148 women at California’s Institution for Women in Corona and Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla. While sterilizations in California are allowed with use of state funds and approval from high medical officials in Sacramento, no physician working in the prisons requested such consent. Moreover, most women prisoners claimed that they were coerced to follow sterilization procedures, also described as tubal ligation.
Christina Codero, 34, a former inmate at the Valley State prison, describes the pressure of sterilization from medical professionals. As she states, “As soon as he found out that I had five kids, he suggested that I look into getting it done. The closer I got to my due date, the more he talked about it. He made me feel like a bad mother if I didn’t do it.” The physician seemed to make assumptions about Codero’s economic burdens to justify her need to be sterilized. Whether or not doctors are in favor of tubal ligation procedures for women prisoners who may not be financially stable, they are not authorized to control women’s reproductive rights. The mass sterilizations of California women prisoners’ reflects the struggles associated with women of color and poor women’s reproductive rights in in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
Specifically, the medical profession’s role, as represented in the California prison cases, is quite similar to that involved with Mexican women in the 1970s. Due to Mexican women’s ethnic and economic vulnerability, Rickie Solinger, author of Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America argues that doctors consistently “defined [Mexican women] as undeserving reproducers, as inappropriate for ‘membership in the national community’, and as potential mothers of ‘future’ undesirable’ citizens.’” [2] In the case of Madrigral v. Quilligan, Los Angeles County Medical Center doctors were accused of sterilizing Mexican women without their complete understanding and consent of what the procedure encompassed. In 1973, Guadalupe Acosta, a poor Mexican living in Los Angeles, gave birth to a child suffering from brain damage. The child did not survive and her doctor sterilized her without her permission. Meanwhile, the doctor blamed her husband for giving consent to terminate Acosta’s reproductive capacity. Her husband denied the charge, yet medical authority prevents anything from being resolved.
Indeed, the language and cultural barriers confronting the Mexican-origin group left them more vulnerable to abuses in the health care system. Doctors were convinced that sterilization procedures were providing women with an optimal solution to diminish their economic burdens. Also, the procedure was seen as an “easy” fix for women who were thought incapable of using effective contraception. In such cases, medical professionalism played a major role in controlling the reproductive rights for women of color.
The lack of sensitivity among the general public, medical professional, and state concerning forced sterilization and reproductive rights for marginalized populations are problematic. During the reproductive rights movement, women of color and white women formed various feminist organizations and groups, to create a community for discourse as well as to increase political, social, and economic awareness regarding reproductive issues. Moreover, as a nation, we should by now have progressed further in preventing the denial of women’s reproductive rights.
The fight for women’s reproductive rights continues even today. The current debates on legal contraception use are widely discussed, especially in regard to women utilizing family planning. Specifically, Congressmen have argued against having women’s health care plans cover contraception. Bizarrely, illegal or forced sterilizations persist, yet there is little or no current debate on the ways this impacts women and their right to bear children. Controlling women’s reproduction system seems unacceptable through legal means, meanwhile some see it as not so harmful when it is forced and not approved by institutions, such as the prison system.
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1. Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement. NewYork University Press, 2003.
2. Rickie Solinger, Pregnancy and Power, A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America. New York University Press, 2005.
