Thread by @AAPolicyForum

The reports of forced hysterectomies in ICE detention centers emerging this week are horrifying but not surprising. The U.S. has a long and shameful history of using forced sterilization to target and carry out violence against women of color. apnews.com/f2008d23c5f908…

Throughout the 20th century, 32 states ran federally-funded sterilization programs aimed at halting the reproduction of those deemed unintelligent and unfit. The practice especially took off after the Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell.

In Buck v. Bell Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

Unsurprisingly, women of color have always faced compulsory sterilization at disproportionate rates. In California, where nearly one third of approved sterilizations took place, Latinx women were 59% more likely to be sterilized between 1920-1945 under the state’s eugenics laws.

During the 1960s and 70s, around a quarter of Native American women of childbearing age were sterilized by the Indian Health Service, many under pressure or without their full understanding. time.com/5737080/native…

In North Carolina, between 1928 and 1973, around 7,600 sterilizations were approved by the Eugenics Board and performed. An estimated 65% of the women sterilized were Black, even though only around 25% of the state’s population was Black.

In 1973 the Southern Poverty Law Center brought a lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of Mary Alice and Minnie Relf, ages 14 and 12, who were sterilized in Alabama after their mother, who was illiterate, signed an X on a piece of paper.

The district court found that, “Over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low‐income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs,” many of them coerced by the threat to take away welfare benefits.

Federal funds are no longer used for forced sterilizations but the practice has never left. After a 2013 report into sterilizations in California prisons, the State Auditor found that more than a quarter of the procedures between 2005-2013 were performed without lawful consent.

The legacy of forced sterilization as racist population control is long in the U.S., and efforts to paint forced sterilization as a practice of past foreign evils are willfully ahistorical. Ignoring history hurts us in the current fight.