Lots of biology teachers show their students this map in their classes. I’m one of them. The US has an ugly history of involuntary sterilization, using the excuse of eugenics. Personally, I like to point out that our progressive state of Minnesota sterilized over a thousand unwilling people, all in the name of helping society.
But that’s from 1935! We don’t do that anymore, right?
The state of California had to pass a law to compensate all the women they have sterilized in the last decade. Now they’re squirming to avoid paying out.
Pressure from advocates for incarcerated people and investigative reporting pushed California officials to take action in recent years. In 2021 state lawmakers passed a reparations program to provide $35,000 to each person who was involuntarily sterilized while in state custody.
But that program has compensated only a fraction of the around 800 women identified by a state audit who underwent procedures that could have resulted in sterilization while imprisoned between 2005 and 2013; that state audit also found that prison doctors regularly violated the consent process for such procedures during that time. As of June, the California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB), the body tasked with determining who gets reparations under the program, has approved compensation for roughly 120 of those survivors, according to documents from the board.
How do you sterilize 800 people against their will by accident? This would be grounds for massive malpractice suits, except that it happened in prisons.
In 2014, the California State Auditor found many violations of the consent process leading up to the sterilization procedures, including physicians failing to sign documents certifying that the women “appeared mentally competent and understood the lasting effects of the procedure.†They also found that the sterilizations were not always reported if they were conducted alongside another procedure, such as a woman giving birth.
The audit also found that the majority of women who were sterilized were between the ages of 26 and 35, and most had a high school reading level. Of the women who received a tubal ligation procedure, which blocks or removes fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy (one of the only procedures the compensation board previously deemed eligible for reparations), between 2005 and 2013, 50 were white, 47 were Hispanic, and 35 were Black. For most, it was their first time being incarcerated.
So a woman gives birth, and the prison doctor goes back in and scrapes out her endometrium? That’s unjustified and should be treated as criminal behavior.
Don’t worry. Some of the doctors have a perfectly good excuse — they were doing these women a favor.
The news outlet also interviewed an OB-GYN at Valley State Prison, James Heinrich, who claimed he was providing an important service to poor women. “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for those unwanted children—as they procreated more,†he said in 2013.
“Heinrich”? Really? Did he have to have such a German name? Regardless of nationality, doctors should never carry out a medical procedure without informed consent, that the patient does not want, because they think they know what’s best.
This may be a silly question, but why haven’t actions been brought against the licenses of the doctors and nurses who participated in this? Reparations are good, but putting a deterrent in place against it happening again by stripping the medical practitioners of their licenses would be super fantastic.
@awomanofnoimportance
Prexactly. They need to be stripped of their licenses. Nothing less.
Especially when they confess that they did it to prevent future children.
An obvious question: How many men were sterilized/castrated under that system?
Oh wait, men have nothing to do with this.
Fuckin’ A.
What’s wrong with Heinrich?
My mother grew up in NAZI Germany and a friend of her mother was from a family with a history of mental problems. The daughter had to have a normal operation and whilst under anaesthetic she was sterilised and the family told afterwards.
If it’s not entirely off-topic I’d be interested to know how many cases of FGM are happening in the USA and whether they’re defended as “Freedom of Religion”?
By the way can anyone recommend a good history of Eugenics please?
submoron @ # 6 – I haven’t read, but have seen endorsements by people with reliable judgment, Harry Bruinius’s Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity, Christine Rosen’s Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, and (recommended by Niles Eldredge) Daniel Kevles’s In the Name of Eugenics.
Those all came out around 20 years back, so more titles have probably been published since (hrrm – including Jennifer Coburn’s Cradles of the Reich, which AP in 2022 reviewed as a “richly detailed” account of three pregnant women in the Nazi eugenics program).
@6 The US expressly forbids FGM and also has foreign policy rules about US foreign aid being used to fund or otherwise support FGM.
https://www.reproductiverights.org/sites/default/files/documents/pub_bp_fgmlawsusa.pdf
There was a problem with wealthy fundamentalist Muslims in the US sending their daughters abroad to be mutilated in the 90s and early aughts, since no US doctor would perform the practice (at the risk of being stripped of their medical license and facing fines and imprisonment). It is an offense that can allow the US to terminate your green card or revoke your US citizenship if you are already naturalized, since it is treated as a human trafficking case, (as I understand it).
https://www.careinternational.org.uk/news-stories/the-fight-against-fgm-how-an-imam-is-speaking-out/#:~:text=It%20was%20the%20first%20time,be%20prohibited%20by%20Islam%20altogether.
https://www.unicef.org/guinea/en/stories/i-was-lucky-have-father-who-was-categorically-opposed-excision-nantenin-15-years-old
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/06/05/virginia-mosque-embattled-after-imam-said-female-genital-mutilation-prevents-hypersexuality/
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/11/health/fgm-us-survivor-stories-trnd/index.html
Spoiler: you are being targeted because you are a criminal and a butcher.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna38643880
Sadly, Sweden was one of the first countries to do eugenics, and on a big scale. The politicians wanted to modernize the country and were duped by pseudoscience.
By contrast, in Britain intellectuals like G K Chesterton [author of “Father Brown”] opposed eugenics as unacceptable. He was religious, but a great humanitarian. In Sweden the church was 100% behind eugenics.
Knew I’d find the link sooner or later
https://www.uscis.gov/FGMC
I am pleased to see that FGM is so universally condemned
Thank you all. Pierce R. Butler @7, silvrhalide @8 and others.
I’ll buy these books when I can find affordable copies.
Meanwhile, is there any objection to Adam Rutherford’s ‘Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics;? which I have seen recommended elsewhere?
birgerjohansson–
Chesterton was a traditionalist and a Catholic apologist, so I see him as a complicated figure rather than a great humanitarian, but yes he was absolutely spot on in his rejection of eugenics both morally and (although it wasn’t the main thrust of his argument) scientifically when he described the purpose of Nazi eugenics as “to preserve the purity of a race in a continent where all races are impure.”
submoran
Adam Rutherford is pretty good generally, though I’ve not read that book.
I knew a young woman back in the 70s who was told that she had 2 uteri and the doctor told her that he’d removed “the one she kept getting pregnant in†. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he’d lied to her and saw no reason to upset her. I do remember how shocked I was that this type of abusive sterilization was still happening
800 lots of 35,000 is only like 28 million. When you factor in appeals, bad press, and the fact that denying payouts is a more complex once you have identified the people this seems like a more expensive approach than the ethically correct choice of just fucking paying out
dangerousbeans, agreed, seems like people in power get hopelessly addicted to screwing people around as a default behaviour.
@dangerousbeans, josephb
This shouldn’t be a surprise. People with the power to spend other people’s money are always much happier to spend that money defending themselves than apologizing. Institutions generally (government or private) would consider it worthwhile to spend an order of magnitude or more on defense, rather than on compensating their victims.
See also: the UK Postmasters scandal – well over a hundred million pounds spent to defend the organization over charges that it wrongly imprisoned individual people over discrepancies in the low tens of thousands of pounds. The number is only important when it involves damage/costs to little people, no amount is too much to spend to protect the powerful.
@ChrisLawson
“Chesterton was a traditionalist and a Catholic apologist, so I see him as a complicated figure rather than a great humanitarian, but yes he was absolutely spot on in his rejection of eugenics both morally and (although it wasn’t the main thrust of his argument) scientifically when he described the purpose of Nazi eugenics as “to preserve the purity of a race in a continent where all races are impure.—
Charles Darwin’s great nephew (by marriage), Josiah Wedgwood, an MP, also opposed it in Parliament and worked with Chesterton (though religiously and politically they were quite different) and may have been the main person to see the mandatory sterilization laws did not pass. Admittedly there were many others in the Darwin/Wedgwood families who supported the eugenics laws (Charles Darwin himself was long dead by this time).
Let me get this straight. We agree that sterilizing vulnerable young adult women involuntarily or with insufficient informed consent: eugenics and bad.
But on FreeThoughtBlogs, sterilizing minors via a regimen of blocking normally-timed puberty, followed by cross-sex hormones and surgeries, is leading liberal cause, very good, no problems to see here, there needs to be more of it, and anyone who opposes it is a regressive bigot.
Even though the minors cannot possibly be mature enough to give actual legitimate informed consent to these “treatments”, even if the evidence base for these treatments was good, and it turns out the evidence base is judged to be poor by the health services of many European countries.
History is repeating folks, it’s right in front of you.
Delaying puberty is not sterilization. It is also not done involuntarily with insufficient informed consent.
The “minors cannot possibly be mature enough to give actual legitimate informed consent” argument means kids can’t get vaccinations or appendectomies. We have to trust parents to make decisions for them.
You just want to deny the best available medical practice for people who have needs different than yours. You’re a sicko.
FYI, the exact same bigots who pretend to be very concerned about the loss of fertility of trans men raged at Freddy McConnel for having a baby, called it “child abuse”, and insisted he should have been sterilized.
” McConnell”. Google him.
@Tim Tri – Fuck you and your false equivalence.
Of course. That’s what power is for. If you’re trying to be nice to people, you have no use for power.
@Tim Tri #19:
A worthwhile aim, I’ll grant you that. However, do you now accept that you didn’t get it straight?
OK.
Tim Tri is a troll and he is flat out lying.
No one is sterilizing minors in the USA, whether they are Trans or not.
The age for surgeries that may result in sterility is at least 18 and usually much older than that.
Puberty blockers are not sterilizing and they are reversible.
This is simple, well known medicine. They were originally developed to treat a serious medical condition, premature puberty, where very young children start going through puberty. This causes all sorts of problems, notably their bone growth plates ( epiphysial plates) close early, resulting in adults shorter and smaller than they would otherwise be.
Trans people aren’t a leading liberal cause.
A world with human rights for all and free from mindless hate and bigotry is. We stand with gay, Trans, women, nonwhites, nonxians, children, the educated, and all the other groups people like you hate and try to discriminate against.
You are a regressive bigot. You are also a stupid troll and a liar.
Further to Tim Tri’s drive-by foot shooting: when trans people opt for treatments that affect fertility they are advised to consider freezing ova or semen before treatment starts so that, should they wish to start a family in the future, they can do so with their own gametes. That is, the goal of trans treatment is not and never has been sterilisation and any incidental fertility loss can be managed with widely available reproductive care.
In short, Tim Tri doesn’t understand the concept of medical consent and doesn’t know anything about the science behind transgender medicine but still sees fit to drop hateful errors into public discourse.
Actually, here in the Netherlands not so long ago people had to undergo full transition, effectively sterilizing them in the process, before they could legally change their registered sex. It was trans hate that forced them to be sterilized, not trans care.