Sterilized.
Once upon a time in the United States, there were widespread government programs to forcibly sterilize women. While state programs sterilized all those deemed undesirable, like women with mental illness, women in prison, poor white women, and women of color, Black women were disproportionately targeted for sterilization, often without their knowledge or consent. Though it is unknown the exact number of African American women who were sterilized throughout the United States during the 20th century, state records reveal that the number is surely in the tens of thousands.
The state programs were based on a fraudulent junk science called Eugenics that aimed to improve the human race by preserving certain genetic lines deemed desirable and eliminating those genetic lines deemed undesirable.
In the United States, 32 states had legal Eugenics programs. North Carolina is cited as having the most aggressive program, carried out via the powerful North Carolina Eugenics Board from 1929 to 1974. That is not a typo. The state of North Carolina forcibly sterilized women as recently as 1974. California’s notorious program ran from1909 to 1979. Due to its high population, California led the country in the sheer number of sterilizations, comprising 1/3 of the nation’s total sterilizations. According to a 1989 study, at one point 31.6% of African American women without a high school diploma were sterilized.
In the 1930s, United States sterilization programs, particularly that of California, caught the attention of one Adolph Hitler who found in the pseudoscience a much-needed scientific justification and legitimacy for his goal of racial cleansing. Hitler wrote, "I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock." In Mien Kampf he added, “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.” Hitler soon began to implement similar programs in Nazi Germany funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation. Estimates put the number of those sterilized by Nazi Germany at 400,000.
Upon returning from Germany in 1934, California Eugenics leader C.M. Goethe gushed to a colleague, “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought ... I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”
Another New York Eugenics researcher, Harry H. Laughlin, was proud that his Model Eugenic Sterilization laws were implemented by the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws. In 1936, Laughlin was invited to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the “science of cleansing” by Germany’s Heidelberg University purposefully scheduled on the anniversary of Hitler's 1934 purge of Jews from the Heidelberg faculty.
America would do well to remember that it shines as a beacon and an example to the rest of the world, whatever that example might be. I can’t help but think that this week’s successful coup in Burma was emboldened by last month’s failed coup attempt in Washington D.C., but I digress.
While many of the formal Eugenics programs were finally outlawed, whisperings of continued forced sterilizations, particularly in prisons and immigration facilities, exist today. One crusader fighting healthcare violence against women of color is the remarkable Kelli Dillon.
As a young woman, Kelli Dillon shot and killed her abusive husband. She was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison. While an inmate in Central California Women’s Facility in 2001, she began experiencing pain in her abdomen. A doctor told her that he suspected ovarian cysts and recommended a biopsy. After the procedure, Ms. Dillon started experiencing heart palpitations and night sweats. Her periods stopped. In addition to removing the cysts, without warning or consent, the doctor had removed her ovaries. Kelli Dillon had been forcibly sterilized without her knowledge. She was 24 years old. This is not as rare of a story as you would think in California prisons. Now out of prison, Kelly is helping to expose the alarming pattern of Eugenics in California prisons and is the subject of the documentary film, Belli of the Beast.
Anecdotally, it is a running (and sad) joke among Black women about how a physician’s answer to our complaints about anything that can be remotely linked to our reproductive systems, like chronic pain or fatigue, is inevitably… a total hysterectomy. The long-term consequences of hysterectomies, aside from not being able to bear children, include depression, hot flashes, night sweats, weight gain, mood swings, irritability, hair loss, vaginal dryness, dry skin, incontinence, loss of bone density, and rapid heartbeat. In short, it messes you up physically and mentally forever.
At the suggestion of our doctors, Black women today have hysterectomies at a rate three times higher than our white counterparts and 1/3 of sterilizations happen between the ages of 18 and 34. And before you think this might have something to do with poverty, I personally know lawyers and physicians who were talked into hysterectomies by their doctors in their 30s and 40s. Hell, if my doctor, and a second opinion, said I need a hysterectomy, I’d probably get one, too. Still, most studies try to point to socio-economic, educational, psychological, and even possible physical differences in Black women as a potential cause of this discrepancy. In short, the studies try to point to some deficiency in the Black woman, but all of the studies conclude that those things can’t totally account for the difference. One went so far as to opine that it might be our choice of doctor or our decision to follow our doctor’s recommendations as a potential cause as if white women just go around refusing hysterectomies. I have yet to see a study that even suggests what we all know, it’s the doctors.
The American healthcare system has sterilized Black women at alarming rates since its inception and it continues to do so today. It is a part of American health culture. Our dentists don’t treat our teeth, they pull them. Our doctors don’t treat our symptoms, they send us home as malingering or, if we persist, order a hysterectomy.
Perhaps one day, I’ll write a piece about what the American healthcare system does to Black women who carry children. Spoiler alert: Our infant and maternal mortality rates are through the roof! They are comparable to that of many underdeveloped countries. This remains true adjusting for education and income. Many of us, mothers and babies, just don’t make it. I barely did.
