Posted October 5, 2020 by Venke Kofod Christiansen Categories

Nonconsensual hysterectomies

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Delivered of Burden - How the allegations of nonconsensual hysterectomies against Irwin County's ICE center is the modern inheritor of America's history of eugenics

There has been much hysteria in the media over the last week concerning the ‘mass hysterectomies’ (the surgical removal of all or part of the uterus) that have allegedly occurred at Irwin County’s ICE center. Whilst the whistleblower report, which came to public attention September 14, 2020, detailing gynecologist Dr Mahendra Amin’s non-consensual sterilization of, at least, 5 women, is certainly shocking, a probable majority may not find it surprising.

Whilst the number of those affected remains uncertain, Pramila Jayapal, the Seattle Democrat congresswoman reports herself alone having found, at least, 17 examples of unnecessary medical procedures, including but not limited to hysterectomies, being performed on women at the Irwin County center (2020). It seems the number of malpractice cases have been disregarded as unimportant. The significance of Wooten’s report is not that a single gynecologist has been mis-practicing, even though Amin’s reputation as the ‘uterus collector’ is alarming, but rather, as Jayapal stated on Wednesday of last week, that it is “part of a pattern of conduct.” On this abuse of human rights, Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Project South, an organization that promotes racial and economic justice, comments:

The whole picture is very disturbing and there is need for fundamental change. The call for accountability goes beyond this one individual doctor, it’s about the system…We don’t believe that things are going to change if you get rid of one doctor or have a superficial change in the medical staff (2020).

A strong backlash has ensued against the accusations levelled at Irwin Country ICE center, including allegations of substandard COVID-19 health and safety precautions. Although forceful criticism and outrage has led to investigation of and action against misconduct, related issues such as systemic abuse of ethnic minorities’ reproductive rights have still not been voiced loudly enough. The procedures that have come to light in the past few weeks are not a stand-alone issue. If the chain of past events leading Irwin County’s grisly present are not acknowledged now, we will continue to see this type of systematic abuse repeated in the future.

The language used to describe the ordeal these women have faced is highly reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, which in turn, were inspired by America’s eugenics (the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations in order to improve the population’s genetic composition) programs dating back to the 1890s. Detailed in Project South’s report (2020) is the account of one detained woman, who noted “when I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies,” a sentiment echoed by immigrant attorney Elizabeth Matherne’s statement against Irwin County, “that is a piece by piece sterilization, but it’s a sterilization” (The Guardian, 2020). However, the birth of America’s interest in eugenics, whilst overshadowed by Nazi Germany’s adoption of these ideologies, is not a century–old problem but merely the start of a mind-set that has actively continued to this day.

The first American laws permitting forced sterilization targeted institutionalized people, particularly those with mental disabilities, such asIndiana’s 1907 sterilization legislation (IN.GOV, 2007). Whilst these laws were considered controversial, (to the extent that the Indiana Supreme Court decided to repeal its 1907 legislation in 1921), the infamous 1927 case Buck v. Bell, where the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, authorizing the state of Virginia’s right to sterilize 20-year-old Carrie Buck, a mental institution patient, against her will, marked a continued public and state interest in ablest and then racist population control.

Harry Laughlin’s 1920s admonishment of the dilution of the American gene pool by, in his opinions, intellectually and morally defective Jewish and Italian immigrants, swiftly took a hold in American politics. President Calvin Coolidge’s statement upon signing the resulting Immigration Restriction Act of 1924: “America must remain American” became a prevalent slogan amongst anti-immigration sentimentalists (a phrase eerily similar to Trump’s slogan, “Make America great again”). Furthermore, the implementation of federally funded eugenics programs across 32 states resulted in the forced sterilization of 70,000 people, with a disproportionate percentage of that figure being black women (Bryant, 2020).

Whilst legislation combatting this abuse of human rights did eventually appear, such as the 1942 Supreme Court case, Skinner v. Oklahoma, and the repeal of the 1924 eugenic intent by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, it has in most part been a lackluster occurrence. Buck v. Bell has never been overturned, Virginia did not repeal its sterilization law until 1974, and North Carolina’s eugenics program, through which 7,600 people were sterilized, did not end until 1977 (Donegan, 2020).

Even when made illegal, the abuse of human procreation rights, particularly within ethnic minority communities, continues to crop up in different guises. One such federal program in the 1960s and 1970s donned doctors within the Indian Health Service with the power to choose which Native American women they personally deemed fit to reproduce, with the consequent decision that between 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized (Blakemore, 2016). Similar to the alleged actions of Dr Mahendra Amin, some gynecologists, such as Dr Clovis Pierce, took it upon themselves to sterilize women whom they believed unfit to be mothers (Barnwell, 1975). It should be noted that Dr Pierce faced no charges and was practicing medicine as recently as 2012 (Donegan, 2020).

Although predominantly affecting women, neither was the male population immune. The public were once again shocked at the revelation in 1972 that the American government, over the previous 40 years, had been conducting a medical experiment in Tuskegee, Alabama, infecting, and then testing the effects of untreated syphilis on hundreds of African-American men (Waxman, 2017). This experiment not only affected the families of those involved at the time, but has had a knock-on effect, as a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research argued:

Life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.5 years in response to the disclosure, accounting for approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men and 25% of the gap between black men and women (Alsan & Wannamaker, 2016).

That these issues are still prevalent in the 21^st century, therefore, comes as no surprise. Hand in hand with the latest round of forced sterilization is the reduction of birth control rights for women in America. The centuries–old sentiment hidden at the heart of both the current issues is the same: To reassert America as a white country through population control.