Sterilization Racism and Pan-Ethnic Disparities of the Past Decade: The Continued Encroachment on Reproductive Rights

Abstract

I n the late 1960s and through the 1970s, reports of coercive, involuntary, and otherwise nonconsenting sterilizations of American Indian, African American, Mexican, and Puerto Rican origin women began surfacing in the United States.1 These revelations came at a time of intense civil rights activity and political consciousness among non-white2 groups in the United States. American Indian and African American women and girls were especially impacted by sterilization abuse. In a well-known case, recounted by Jane Lawrence, Dr. Connie PinkertonUri saw a twenty-six-year-old patient in early November 1972 who visited her clinic and requested a womb transplant.3 It turned out that the woman was given a full hysterectomy (for alcohol* ism) at age twenty after being told by an Indian Health Services (IHS) > doctor that the procedure was reversible. Other scholars have noted cases of American Indian women receiving hysterectomies as young « as age eleven.4 These cases are similar to the experiences of African 2 American women and girls, such as the Reif sisters, ages twelve and i fourteen, who were the unwilling and unknowing recipients of tubai 5 17 sterilization as well as guinea pigs for intrauterine devices and what o were then experimental DepoProvera shots (along with their older ° sister, Katie) in the early 1970s.5 African American civil rights leader £ Fannie Lou Hamer was compelled to get involved in the modern civil « rights movement, in part, after receiving a Mississippi Appendectomy