News broke last week of an official complaint filed against immigration officials alleging a pattern of hysterectomies without informed consent on women from a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Georgia. Dawn Wooten, the nurse who blew the whistle on the allegations of abuse, and who legal advocacy groups filed the complaint on her behalf, had worked at the privately-operated Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, for three years. During that time, she alleged multiple hysterectomies were performed on Spanish-speaking immigrants, many of whom said they did not understand the procedure. ICE has denied the claims, the doctor accused of performing the procedures has denied the claims through attorneys, and the hospital where the procedures would have taken place, said it only has records showing that two hysterectomies were performed on those in immigration custody since 2017, according to the Washington Post.

While the cruelty of the allegations came as a shock to many, coerced sterilization is not unprecedented in the broader history of reproductive injustice and violence against people considered "undesirable" in the United Statesoften disabled and indigenous people, people of color, and immigrants.

Racism has been part and parcel of American reproductive healthcare from its beginning. J. Marion Sims, the man known as the "father of modern gynecology," exemplifies this. Sims garnered acclaim for groundbreaking gynecological surgical techniques that he perfected after performing dozens of experimental surgeries on enslaved Black women in Montgomery, Alabama, beginning in 1845. Sims operated on Black women without anesthesia, even though he used it during surgeries on white patients during the period. Sims's decision to operate on Black women without anesthesia went beyond a lack of care for the women; it was tied to pernicious assumptions that Black people were not susceptible to pain. "There was a belief at the time that Black people did not feel pain in the same way," explained Vanessa Northington Gamble, a physician and professor of medical humanities, in an interview with NPR in 2018. "Their pain was ignored," Gamble says. Baseless theories like these continue to inform modern medicine in measurable ways. Racial biases and false beliefs are associated with Black patients receiving less pain medication for broken bones and cancer than white patients, according to research published in 2016 by the National Academy of Sciences.

A generation after Sims built his career on the backs of Black women, the eugenics movement was growing popular in the United States. With it, States began to pass laws mandating compulsory sterilization for specific populations. The state of Indiana is widely considered to have adopted the world's first eugenic sterilization law in 1907, and similar laws were later adopted in 31 other states across the country during the 20th century. The target populations of these laws were defined in legal or pseudo-medical terms"imbeciles," the "feeble-minded"but the laws were deployed in ways that disproportionately victimized poor women and women of color.

Rather than pushing back on eugenic policies during the progressive era that ensued, physicians, legislators, and social reformers further legitimized their prejudiced pseudo-medical norms. American magnates like the Carnegie Foundation and John D. Rockefeller shelled out to fund projects at the Eugenics Record Office, a private research institute that openly supported sterilization as a solution to what it called "defective and delinquent classes of the community." In 1927, when the constitutional legality of compulsory sterilization was questioned in Buck v Bell, the Supreme Court also affirmed that permitting compulsory sterilization of "those who are manifestly unfit" did not violate the constitutional rights of those persons, by a vote of eight to one. Carrie Buck, the plaintiff, was classified at the time as "feeble-minded," but as has been noted, it was actually societal prejudice that earned her this unclear label. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who authored the majority opinion in Buck v Bell, went so far as to claim that compulsory sterilization policies were "better for all the world." Rhetoric like this that framed eugenic sterilization as a positive public health strategy helped ensure the longevity and widespread impact of shameful coerced sterilization policies across the country.

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History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States - Teen Vogue