This essay was originally posted to the UI Women’s Center blog on December 3rd, 2018.

As many know, America has a dark side to its history. What is supposed to be the Land of the Free has at times been a country where freedom of choice is denied.

Imagine this, you’re in the hospital after spending hours in labor and are given strong drugs to reduce the pain. The nurse says you’ll need a C-section, but first you need to sign some papers. She won’t tell you what they’re for, only that if you don’t sign them, your baby will die. Even though you are in pain and can’t even read the English, you sign them and they put you under for the C-section.

Months later you’re with your baby boy and happy to start your new life. Then you get the call, you discover were sterilized. During the C-section the doctors also gave you a tubal ligation and whether you wanted or not, you cannot have more kids. This is the reality for many women, most who are in poverty or are immigrants, around the world, even in the United States.

It happened because of a concept called Eugenics. It is the pseudo-science controlling breeding to improve a human race. Eugenics has always been based on racism and xenophobia.

“Those adjudged to have ‘inferior genes’ were discouraged from reproducing through the establishment of ‘negative eugenics’ programs, such as state-mandated sterilization laws for ‘mental defectives,’ restrictions against who could marry whom, birth control policies, harsh adoption laws and loud nativist calls for laws restricting the entry of ‘swarthy,’ ‘unkempt’ and ‘unassimilable’ immigrants. In essence, eugenics offered Americans in positions of power an authoritative scientific language to substantiate their biases against those they feared as dangerous.”

Dr. Howard Markel

Madrigal v. Quilligan

Eugenic ideas were used to justify the sterilization of people of color. I recently watched the documentary No Más Bebés directed by Renee Tajima-Peña. I found out that Mexican and Mexican-American women in Southern California were coerced  into sterilization in the sixties and seventies.

In 1978, a young Chicana lawyer, Antonia Hernández, would try a case against the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center, the state of California and the federal government. Ten immigrant women, including lead plaintiff Dolores Madrigal, wanted answers, apologies, and reparations for being sterilized without fully informed consent. Many of the women Hernandez contacted for the lawsuit did not even know they had been sterilized. Others had known for years, falling into depression and some of their husbands became abusive.

Here are some the heart breaking testimonies of these women:

“While I was in advanced labor and under anesthesia with complications in my expected childbirth and in great pain, the doctor told me that I had too many children, that I was poor, and a burden to the government and I should sign a paper not to have more children. . .The doctors told me that my tubes could be untied at a later time and I could still have children.” –Jovita Rivera

“A doctor said that if I did not consent to the tubal ligation that the doctor repairing my hernia would use an inferior type of stitching material which would break the next time I became pregnant, but that if I consented to the tubal ligation that the stitches would hold as proper string would be used. No one ever explained what a tubal ligation operation was, I thought it was reversible.” –Helena Orozco

“I was told by members of the Medical Center’s Staff, through a Spanish-speaking nurse as interpreter, that the State of California did not permit a woman to undergo more than three caesarean section operations and that since this was to be my third caesarean section, the doctor would have to do something to me to prevent my having another caesarean section operation. No explanation nor description of the tubal ligation, which was later performed on me without my knowledge and free and informed consent, was given to me.” –Maria Hurtado

These women risked social stigma and had to relive the experience of the humiliating procedure, yet they still testified, not only for themselves but for all women who had gone through the same thing. And in the end, they lost the case.

According to anthropologist Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez “the judge ruled it was impossible to expect personnel in a busy hospital to understand the cultural meaning of having large families to Mexican women, many from rural backgrounds.” So the doctors and the hospital made a mistake because they were too busy, resulting in what sounds like a weak excuse to cover up malpractice. Oh I accidently changed your body forever because I had other things on my mind. What Dr. Quilligan and other doctors did to these women is unjustifiable and unethical. Whether or not they admit to it, those women were changed forever.

Why Care?

Why am I so passionate about this? My own grandmother, who immigrated to Los Angeles in the sixties, could have been a victim of these forced sterilizations of the “unfit.” Not only could this have prevented me from being born, but I also know how devastating that would have been for my grandmother. In Mexican culture, there is an emphasis on having a big family and I can imagine the pain that the victims went through. Many of the women in Madrigal v Quilligan planned on having many children and were devastated at what was done to them. There was also the social stigma that comes from being sterilized, which is especially prevalent in Latino cultures. Some of the women’s husbands put more violence on top of what they had experienced because they assumed that their wives wanted this. Many became suicidal.

One thing is clear; the people and governments who advocated for negative eugenics did not want people like me to be born. They saw the disabled, the poor, and immigrants as human weeds who, if they could not exterminate, would be denied reproductive freedom. As a child of immigrants and as a woman of color, I must speak up about this. While I am thankful and proud to be born in America I must acknowledge the evils this country has participated in. Many other groups have been deemed unworthy and unhuman by default of their race, sex, disability, etc. In reality, we are all made equal and have the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. We must share this truth without censorship and fight for that truth at the expense of prosecution.