Survivors of Calif.'s Forced Institutional Sterilizations, Eugenics: New Reparations Program
- Survivors of California’s forced sterilizations: ‘It’s like my life wasn’t worth anything,’ The Guardian, July 19, 2021. - Ed. A new reparations program will compensate survivors of prison system sterilizations and the 20th century eugenics campaign.
- “When people hear the term eugenics they often think of something that happened a long time ago,” said Lorena García Zermeño, a co-sponsor of the bill. “But the legacy of eugenics continues to this day.” - It wasn’t until years after Kelli Dillon went into surgery while incarcerated in the CA state prison system that she realized her reproductive capacity had been stripped away without her knowledge. In 2001, at 24, she became one of the most recent victims in a history of forced sterilizations in CA that dates to 1909 and served as an inspiration for Nazi Germany’s eugenics program.
But now, under new provisions signed into California’s budget this week, the state will offer reparations for the thousands of people who were sterilized in CA institutions, without adequate consent, often because they were deemed “criminal”, “feeble-minded” or “deviant”. The program will be the first in the nation to provide compensation to modern-day survivors of prison system sterilizations, like Dillon, whose attorney obtained medical records to show that, while she was an inmate in the Central CA women’s facility surgeons had removed her ovaries during what was supposed to be an operation to take a biopsy and remove a cyst.
The investigations sparked by her case, featured in the documentary Belly of the Beast, showed hundreds of inmates had been sterilized in prisons without proper consent as late as 2010, even though the practice was by then illegal. The new CA reparations program will also seek to compensate hundreds of living survivors of the state’s earlier eugenics campaign, first codified into state law in 1909 and not repealed until 1979. That law allowed state authorities to sterilize people in state-run institutions deemed to have “mental disease which may have been inherited” and was “likely to be transmitted to descendants”.
The law was later greatly expanded to include “those suffering from perversion or marked departures from normal mentality”. Those targeted were often Black or Latina women, though some men were sterilized as well. “California established these egregious eugenics laws, that were actually even followed by Hitler himself, in an effort to curb the population of unwanted individuals or people with disabilities,” said the state assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, who introduced the bill to create the compensation program...
Read More,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/19/california-forced-sterilization-prison-survivors-reparations
