Annays Yacamán
Contributing Writer
Content Warning: This article contains reference to violence against people with uteruses and people of color, human rights abuses, and forced sterilization.
On Sept. 15, 2020, the first day of Latinx Heritage Month, the people of the United States were forced to reckon with another violation of human rights by The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as this country’s long history of eugenics. A whistleblower, Dawn Wooten, revealed that at least 20 women were forcibly given hysterectomies at a privately funded ICE detention facility in Irwin, Georgia.
Immigrants in detention centers have faced a lack of COVID-19 protections for months, including risk of sexual assault, lack of sanitation, a repulsive lack of access to legal representation and lack of medical treatment that in the past has led to death. Wooten courageously spoke up for these migrant women. They confided in her, telling her that they had been given hysterectomies against their own will. Wooten was asked by a patient if the doctor was “the uterus collector.”
She also described experiences of people filling out paperwork to get medical help, but instead having their documents shredded by ICE personnel, the horrible lack of sanitation during COVID-19 and stories of medical personnel telling people who were detained that nothing was wrong with them. Women were asked to sign paperwork that was in English, even though they only spoke Spanish. They were not given a Spanish translator, even though those are easier to come by in the United States (in comparison to other indigenous languages).
However, when it came to hysterectomies, the doctor was eager to perform them. One of the women — once released — went to another medical professional who told her this procedure wasn’t necessary. Another woman only found out that she was scheduled for a surgery because a nurse told her that she had a surgery scheduled for the following week, leaving her shocked.
Forced sterilization is genocide. Our people are undergoing senseless and harmful procedures, yet many are surprised. They are ripping our children away at the border and ripping any possibility of having children from women’s uteruses. Why are we surprised, though? The United States has a long history with the sterilization of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. From the assault on people with disabilities and mental health issues to the Jim Crow era where Black women and immigrants were targets of forced sterilization as a part of the United States’ campaign of racism and xenophobia, these cruelties have long been present in the United States.
Between 2006 and 2010, California prisons conducted an estimated 150 coerced hysterectomies. California was known for performing these due to their history of anti-Asian and anti-Mexican hysterectomies. These federally funded forced sterilization programs were present in 32 states in the 20th century. By the 1970s, it was estimated that a third of all women in Puerto Rico had undergone sterilization procedures as a means of population control. It is estimated that between 1970 and 1976, 25-50 percent of all Native American women were forcibly sterilized.
So, I ask the question again, why are we surprised? I find it ironic that just three days after the news of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke, white women rushed social media to ask, “What will happen to my reproductive rights?” Should this not have been asked decades before when Black, Brown and Indigenous women were being stripped of their reproductive autonomy? Aren’t we only free once we are all free? Or is it true that white feminism is just another tool of white supremacy?
Sources: https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights/immigrants-rights-and-detention/immigration-detention-conditions
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/21/unwanted-hysterectomy-allegations-ice-georgia-immigration
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/
