The abortions/forced sterilization that women of color have been going through for decades is inhuman and such a shameful part of America’s history. Abortion/forced sterilization on women of color is inherently racist and it was always glaringly obvious. It was ultimately a way to control and limit the population and reproduction within marginalized communities. There is much to be said about this topic, but I will only be focusing on talking about how and why such a thing was legal, the benefit, or lack thereof, of outsiders, and the target that women of color had on their backs. Even if this topic doesn’t relate to you or you have never cared before, knowledge is a powerful thing and it’s important to be informed and educate others.
Now, when thinking of how the main reason for these laws passing was due to eugenics and berating the ‘unfit’, including the intellectually disabled. You have to think about how and when the main targets suddenly became women of color. The government’s shift of focus went to women of color as early as 1909 when the Asexualization Act was passed by both houses of legislation in California. Which caused approximately 20,000 Mexican and Black women to be sterilized. Puerto Rican women were also being targeted. According to the Berkeley Political Review, ‘From the 1930s to the 1970s, nearly one-third of the women in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, were coerced into sterilization when government officials claimed that Puerto Rico’s economy would benefit from a reduced population. Sterilization was so common that it became known as “La Operación (The Operation)” among Puerto Ricans’ (Manjeshwar, 2020). Numbers were brought up in Paola Alonso’s essay about sterilizations stating, ‘By 1946, 6.5 percent of Puerto Rican women had been sterilized by government hospitals and private clinics. By 1953, almost 17 percent (one-fifth) of Puerto Rican women were sterilized.24 By the 1960s, these sterilization efforts led to the tubal ligation of about one-third of Puertorriquenas (Alonso, pg 5). Puerto Rican women had the highest sterilization rate in the 20th century.
There also comes the question of how this benefits the rest of society. Simple response: it doesn’t. It’s pretty obvious how seeing as the rest of society would be those unaffected, aka white people. All of this has been rooted in white supremacy. All those laws that were passed despite not explicitly stating so, had their beginning in white supremacy. America is all about being a white American patriot, but that idea can’t come to fruition with all these different races coming and making America their home. Anyone not white will face discrimination and racism in multiple forms, even ones not intended for them.
And it hasn’t stopped, forced sterilizations are still going on because as previously mentioned Buck v. Bell was never overturned. It also doesn’t help that these sterilizations are happening in prisons and detention centers, these people are deemed a danger to society and are past the point of sympathy. There have been women in prison facilities in California that have been sterilized as recently as 2007. Women have been offered to be sterilized in exchange for reduced sentences, which brings the question if consent was there in the first place. Just 7 years ago, it came out that immigrant women in ICE detention facilities have been forcefully sterilized with little to no proper consent or communication of what was going to be done to their bodies. All this happening in the 21st century gives me practically zero hope that these forced sterilizations are stopping anytime soon. We’re going backwards and women of color are going to feel it first and harder.