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<h2><a
href="http://sfbayview.com/2014/who-gets-to-choose-coerced-sterilization-in-california-prisons/"
title="Who gets to choose? Coerced sterilization in California
prisons">Who gets to choose? Coerced sterilization in California
prisons</a></h2>
<div class="date">June 23, 2014</div>
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<p><em><strong>by Rallie Murray</strong></em></p>
<p>In California, policy-driven sterilization programs have reared
their ugly head once again. Women prisoners in the care of the
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR)
have been confronted with coerced sterilization, according to a <a
href="http://cironline.org/reports/female-inmates-sterilized-california-prisons-without-approval-4917">report</a>
released last July by the Center for Investigative Reporting.</p>
<p>Nearly 150 women prisoners were sterilized between 2005 and 2013
without the necessary state approvals. Women were targeted based
on repeat offender status and likelihood to return to prison, as
well as the number of children they had.</p>
<p>Prisoners who were pregnant at the time of their incarceration
report having been pressured to consider sterilization, some made
to feel as though it were a matter of course when giving birth in
a prison, others made to feel as if they were bad mothers if they
did not go through with it, and others coerced while still in the
delivery room.</p>
<p>On June 19, the California State Auditor released an initial <a
href="https://www.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2013-120.pdf">report</a>,
an official examination of the claims made by these women and by
the coalitions and agencies working with them. The report found
that among the 144 cases reviewed, at least 39 sterilizations were
carried out without the inmate’s lawful consent.</p>
<p>Twenty-seven cases showed no physician signature on forms
confirming two key components of consent in voluntary
sterilization procedures: mental competence and full understanding
of the lasting effects of the procedure and that the required
waiting period – minimum of 30 days, maximum of 80 days – had been
fulfilled. Free, prior and informed consent are vital components
of medical ethics, and the lack of paperwork in these 27 cases is
suspicious if not outright disturbing.</p>
<p>Despite the women participating in this dispute stating that they
were repeatedly asked whether they had decided to undergo
sterilization, sometimes without even being told why the physician
felt it was medically necessary, Dr. James Heinreich of Valley
State Prison, one of the institutions held accountable for the
sterilization campaign, has made statements that he feels as
though the outcry against his services are unfair.</p>
<p>It has been suggested by the implicated physicians as well as
some of those responding in the news and in social media that the
women complaining about this are just seeking a handout from the
state. In regards to the $147,460 spent by the State of California
on sterilization from 1997 to 2010, Heinreich stated, “Over a
10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money … compared to
what you save in welfare paying for those unwanted children – as
they procreated more.”</p>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #800000;">Nearly
150 women prisoners were sterilized between 2005 and 2013
without the necessary state approvals.</span></h3>
<p>Crucial for the ongoing movements for prisoner justice, the audit
also criticized the CDCR as well as the federal receiver for
allowing such abuses of medical ethics and practice to take place.
Liz Gransee, a spokesperson from the federal receiver’s office,
has acknowledged their fault in failing to ensure that free, prior
and informed consent was obtained.</p>
<p>She stated that the federal receiver would be complying with the
audit’s recommendation to report the physicians involved to the
California Department of Public Health, a critical step in
ensuring that such abuses are less likely to happen in the future.
At the same time, members of the state Senate Health Committee
voted unanimously to approve SB 1135, a bill which would ban the
sterilization of women prisoners in all cases except medical
emergencies.</p>
<p>The overwhelming public response, both when this story first
broke last summer and now as the state audit has been released,
has fallen to two sides – one, the side which seemingly agrees
with people like Dr. Heinreich in thinking that women prisoners
would irresponsibly have more children who would be a further
drain on the system; and two, those driven by the righteous
indignation that something like this could happen here, could
happen now.</p>
<p>Surely coerced sterilizations must be some legacy of a dark
fascistic past or a different sort of place. All of which is a
convenient way to forget the lineage of coerced sterilization in
the United States over the past several decades.</p>
<p>The United States and California especially has a long and
storied past when it comes to compulsory and coerced
sterilization. The Eugenics Movement began here – the initial
targets principally amongst those with disabilities but branching
out to encompass all the “undesirables”: the poor, the remaining
Indigenous populations and people of color.</p>
<p>California sterilized more people than any other state in the
country by a wide margin – at least a third of all sterilization
procedures. Information on the California eugenics operation was
of key importance to Nazi Germany in undertaking its own eugenics
movement.</p>
<p>But since World War II the word “eugenics” has carried the
lingering stench of the charnel houses of the Holocaust, and so
coerced sterilization protocols have needed to operate under an
unspoken agreement that what they are doing is not anything quite
so awful as “eugenics,” but is simply a means of ensuring the
greater good.</p>
<p>Managing “undesirable” populations has been an easily forgotten
undercurrent in U.S. policy, one that has not received much
ongoing media attention despite its history and the outcries
against its continued use. The reproductive choices of women of
color – especially poor women of color – have been a target of
population management throughout U.S. history. People of color
have long been seen as “surplus” populations in danger of
overwhelming the United States.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #800000;">The
United States and California especially has a long and storied
past when it comes to compulsory and coerced sterilization. The
Eugenics Movement began here.</span></h3>
<p>Poor communities, especially communities of color, were held to
be incapable of raising children “correctly.” All that was
necessary was to point to the government assistance they might be
receiving to illustrate how they were not teaching their children
to be good, productive citizens but instead to be reliant on the
state. This sort of language masked the racist undertone of such
claims.</p>
<p>Children of color were dangerous because through them communities
of color could persist. Women of color raising children in poverty
were accused of being irresponsible mothers for a variety of
reasons, such as having too many children so that they could
receive more benefits from the state.</p>
<p>This myth grew during the post-war period. It demeaned women of
color for daring to have families, for trying to provide for those
families even in the absence of a male head of household, and for
refusing to tailor their reproductive choices to the desires of
the white majority.</p>
<p>Because the fertility “problem” of the woman of color was
presented as a concern for public safety and welfare, it became a
problem that could be tackled by bureaucratic policy. Starting in
1970, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare ramped up
programs which covered the majority of sterilization costs for
willing Medicaid recipients.</p>
<p>By the end of the decade, seven out of the ten U.S. hospitals
performing voluntary sterilization treatments for women receiving
Medicaid support had violated federal guidelines in their
disregard for informed consent procedures for elective
hysterectomies.</p>
<p>Indigenous women bore the brunt of this policy. As members of a
community robbed of political power, of a community which had been
targeted for eradication in the previous century and who relied
upon government assistance for health care, they were perhaps seen
as a good place to start; the Indian Health Services authorized
fully-funded sterilization in 1970.</p>
<p>While findings from state-sponsored research differ from those of
independent activists, it is difficult to argue that a deliberate
policy of eugenics was not being enacted against poor Indigenous
women. According to a 1976 report by the General Accounting Office
(GAO), approximately 5 percent of Indigenous women of childbearing
age receiving services at clinics and hospitals in the reporting
area had been sterilized. Indigenous activists, however, report
numbers as high as 25 percent.</p>
<p>At a Claremont, Okla., facility, one woman was sterilized of
every seven who gave birth at the hospital. Many women were in
their 20s; 38 of those identified in the GAO report were under the
age of 21. These women were sterilized because they were believed
to be “unfit mothers,” because they had “too many” children or
simply as a matter of policy.</p>
<p>Women were pressured to give children who had already been born
up to foster care because their quality of life would be better
outside the poor Indigenous community they had been born into.</p>
<p>In 1976, the GAO released the statement that it would not be
productive to seek free, prior and informed consent from
Indigenous women being sterilized. A bureaucratic hassle, perhaps?
Unnecessary in the face of the immense public good that was being
provided? Decisions made to manipulate and deceive Indigenous
women into giving up their reproductive agency were based on the
belief that any future children would have lives not worth living
and that the population of the U.S. would benefit from their
removal.</p>
<p>Watching the responses to this report and the other articles it
has spawned across the web, one thing has been abundantly clear:
For far too many people, far too many women and reproductive
health activists, the history of eugenics within the United States
has been forgotten or completely ignored. There is a degree of
privilege at play here in that white activists have not faced the
same history of reproductive oppression as women of color.</p>
<p>Campaigns for reproductive agency overwhelmingly target the
language of choice as it predominantly affects white women: the
choice whether to terminate or keep a pregnancy. They rarely if
ever discuss the kind of choice being robbed by people like Dr.
Heinreich and his fellow physicians that limits a woman’s ability
to have a family in the first place and to determine how many
children she wishes to have, not just how few.</p>
<p>In order to confront the issues faced by women prisoners today,
we need to also consider the ways in which the state has actively
employed such procedures in the past. The secret history of
reproductive agency is too often forgotten or ignored in political
debate, but somehow they still manage to find a way to say that
providing for large, low-income families is a burden on the state
and that the lives of poor children of color aren’t worth living
anyway.</p>
<h3><strong>What you can do</strong></h3>
<p>Those interested in taking further action can write directly to
their state representative regarding SB 1153 or sign the <a
href="http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/governor-brown-support.fb50?source=s.icn.fb&r_by=147222">petition
at MoveOn.org</a> urging the California legislature to
immediately pass the bill.</p>
<p><em>Rallie Murray is a doctoral student at the California
Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where she works
with prisoners in long-term solitary confinement and with the
larger community to build awareness about current issues
stemming from the criminal (in)justice system. She can be
contacted at </em><a href="mailto:rxmurray13@gmail.com"><em>rxmurray13@gmail.com</em></a><em>.
</em></p>
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