America's secret history of forced sterilization (on mostly minority women) [View all]

[pnwmom]

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/29/americas_secret_history_of_forced_sterilization_remembering_a_disturbing_and_not_so_distant_past/

Writing for the majority in the Supreme Court’s landmark case, Buck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described Charlottesville native Carrie Buck as the “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted,” writing that “her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.” In that ruling, the Court found that that the Virginia Sterilization Act, under which Carrie was sterilized, was Constitutional. Citing the best interests of the state, Justice Holmes affirmed that Virginia’s law was valuable, and that laws like it could prevent the country from being “swamped with incompetence.” The Court accepted, without evidence, that Carrie and her mother were promiscuous and that therefore, the three generations of Bucks shared the genetic trait of feeblemindedness. Based on this assessment, the Court found that it was in the state’s best interest to have Carrie Buck sterilized. The ruling was considered a major victory for eugenicists.

In Monday’s PBS documentary premiere, “No Más Bebés,” Maria Hurtado speaks of the moment she realized that she couldn’t have more children, “They must’ve thought, ‘this woman has so many kids, we’ll just sew her up, so she won’t know that we did the operation.’” Mrs. Hurtado is one of ten plaintiffs who filed a civil rights lawsuit against doctors at the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center, claiming that they were sterilized without their consent. Another woman, Conseulo Hermosillo, then 23 years old, didn’t realized that she had been sterilized until she asked her doctor for birth control. Maria Figueroa was raising her young children in East Los Angeles when she learned that she’d been sterilized. Dolores Madrigal and her husband were saving up for a house and more children by working factory jobs. When they learned that Dolores had been sterilized, her family broke apart, as she and her husband dealt with the pain and anger of their crushed dreams. In “No Más Bebés,” filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña tells the story of these Mexican immigrant women who sued a powerful hospital, county doctors, the state of California and the U.S. Government after having been sterilized without their consent.

In the early and mid 1970s a young Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld, working in the obstetrics ward of the L.A. County USC Medical Center in the predominantly Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood of East L.A., began to notice that immigrant women, not fluent in English, were being pushed into tubal ligations while they were in the active late stages of labor. Several of the women in the film remember the moment, while being rushed into the operating room for an emergency C-section, that they were given a piece of paper, in English, to sign. Over several years, Dr. Rosenfeld covertly gathered proof of these sterilizations and sought out the help of a young Chicana attorney, Antonia Hernández, to bring a legal challenge. In 1978, after months of tracking down the women who had been sterilized, Hernández and her clients brought a lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, and asserted that their right to bear children had been violated by coercive sterilization. Anchoring the argument to Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut, Hernandez’ legal strategy was to prove that there is an established individual right to procreate. “No Más Bebés” tells the story of their fight to stop the practice of sterilization without consent.

SNIP