[Ppnews] Prison Proposal for "elective" sterilization

[Political Prisoner News]

Prison Proposal Is Disturbingly Akin to Eugenics

By Robin Levi and Vanessa Huang

Los Angeles Daily Journal, Monday, January 8, 2007



Given California’s shameful history with the 
forced sterilizations of thousands of people 
during the 20th century, you would think that 
bureaucrats would think twice before suggesting 
that the sterilization of an imprisoned woman 
could ever be freely chosen. And you would be wrong.



“Doing what is medically necessary” is how the 
Gender Responsiveness Strategies Commission of 
the California Department of Corrections and 
Rehabilitation termed its July 18 recommendation 
to consider providing, in the course of 
delivering a baby, “elective” sterilization of 
women who give birth in prison, “either 
post-partum or coinciding with cesarean section.”



To describe a sterilization performed under such 
circumstances as voluntary is absurd. One’s 
ability to consent to sterilization — or anything 
else — during pregnancy and labor is limited in 
any setting, not to mention in a coercive 
environment such as a prison. Moreover, Robert 
Sillen, whom U.S. District Judge Thelton 
Henderson appointed last year as federal receiver 
over California’s prison health-care system, has 
documented that a person dies each day in 
California prisons due to gross medical neglect. 
How, in such an environment, could we trust 
prison staff to ensure informed consent to such a procedure?



Though the sterilization program has not 
officially commenced, our work with people in 
California’s women’s prisons indicate that 
prisons themselves already act as agents of 
reproductive oppression. Last year, one young 
Latina woman told us that a prison doctor tried 
to convince her to be sterilized right after she gave birth.



And we are already hearing of coerced and 
unnecessarily invasive procedures to remove the 
reproductive organs of prisoners occurring under 
the cloak of medical necessity.



Given the over-representation of people of color 
in U.S. prisons, the GRSC’s proposed 
sterilizations smack of the state’s long embrace 
of eugenics, the pseudoscience that resulted in 
the forced sterilizations of people in state 
hospitals, ostensibly for mental or developmental 
illness, including “female promiscuity,” 
according to William Keating, a doctor who 
practiced at Sonoma State Hospital in the 1950s.



Because the state has yet to thoroughly examine 
its own longtime enthusiasm for eugenics 
practices, it’s difficult to know how many of the 
estimated 20,000 Californians forcibly sterilized 
by the state in the 20th century were people of 
color, but it’s a good bet that many were. What 
we do know is that, upon embarking on their own 
eugenics program, the Nazis were inspired

by California’s model.



“Elective” sterilization is not the first 
problematic proposal coming out of the GRSC.



Last year, a policy proposal put forward by the 
GRSC used misleadingly family-friendly language 
to dress up a prison expansion scheme as a 
“community-based,” “alternative- to- 
incarceration” plan that would better serve the 
families of imprisoned people. This proposal for 
a whole new system of mini-prisons for women 
failed after Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, the 
proposal’s principal coauthor, removed her name 
from it and declared it to be “a fraud.” That 
hasn’t stopped Assemblywoman Sally Lieber from 
reintroducing the proposal this year.



It is crucial that our elected representatives 
don’t fall for this dangerous policy proposal and 
that such efforts are not given consideration in 
four other states to which GRSC members announced 
their intention to export this California mini-prison expansion model.



No legislators or policy advocates who care about 
low-income women and women of color, racial 
justice, or reproductive rights can continue to 
support the GRSC in good faith. California 
policymakers should demand the termination of all 
state employees present at the meeting at which 
this recommendation to investigate sterilization 
was made, and dismantle the GRSC altogether. 
Accountability to women’s healthcare, 
reproductive freedom and racial justice demands such action.



To truly respond to the needs of people in 
women’s prisons, we need to end the use of 
imprisonment as a de facto response to social problems.



Legislators in California and beyond should know 
better than to consider returning to our shameful 
eugenicist past, and must stand up for what 
voters all know is right: communities where 
everyone is worth caring for. We need to 
radically reduce the number of people in prison, 
beginning with a moratorium on new prison 
construction and staffing. We can then take funds 
saved from building a new system to imprison 
women and redirect them into much-needed social 
services at the county level, independent of the 
prison system, including housing, health care, 
education, and job training. Only then can we have true gender justice.



Robin Levi is the human rights director for 
Justice Now, an Oakland-based human rights 
organization. Vanessa Huang is Justice Now’s campaign and media director.


The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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