No Selves to Consent: Women’s Prisons, Sterilization, and the Biopolitics of Informed Consent

Abstract

In 2013, the California State Legislature investigated the reproductive sterilization of at least 144 people in women’s prisons between 2006 and 2010. Responding to what were understood to be illegal sterilization surgeries, state agencies, such as the state auditor, proposed enforcing and strengthening informed consent laws. Activists, however, publicly doubted that noncoercive consent within prisons is possible. This article examines the ways informed consent works in tandem with, not against, state biopolitics. By analyzing comments made by prison doctors about their reasons for performing sterilizations, I argue that informed consent does not resolve the racialized, gendered, and classed anxieties that drive biopower. Parallels between feminist-of-color theory and the arguments made by prisoner advocates suggest that because prisoners have been relegated to a realm of social death, noncoercive informed consent is not actually possible. I therefore consider the role of informed consent in disciplining incarcerated people of color and poor people incarcerated in women’s prisons. The novel Dawn, by Octavia Butler (1987), approaches these questions of biopolitical power, reproductive discipline, and consent from a different perspective, one that renders “alien” state and medical authority. A reading of this novel responds to the paradox of social death described by Lisa Cacho, which makes what Ruha Benjamin calls “biodefection” impossible under the conditions of biopolitical power. Concluding that informed consent is what prison abolitionists call a “reformist reform,” I argue that reproductive justice requires prison abolition.