[Pnews] Who gets to choose? Coerced sterilization in California prisons

[Prisoner News]

    Who gets to choose? Coerced sterilization in California prisons
    <http://sfbayview.com/2014/who-gets-to-choose-coerced-sterilization-in-california-prisons/>

June 23, 2014
*http://sfbayview.com/2014/who-gets-to-choose-coerced-sterilization-in-california-prisons/*
<http://sfbayview.com/2014/who-gets-to-choose-coerced-sterilization-in-california-prisons/#> 


/*by Rallie Murray*/

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 report 
<http://cironline.org/reports/female-inmates-sterilized-california-prisons-without-approval-4917> 
released last July by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

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.

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.

On June 19, the California State Auditor released an initial report 
<https://www.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2013-120.pdf>, 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.

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.

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.

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."


      Nearly 150 women prisoners were sterilized between 2005 and 2013
      without the necessary state approvals.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


      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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.


      *What you can do*

Those interested in taking further action can write directly to their 
state representative regarding SB 1153 or sign the petition at 
MoveOn.org 
<http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/governor-brown-support.fb50?source=s.icn.fb&r_by=147222> 
urging the California legislature to immediately pass the bill.

/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 //rxmurray13 at gmail.com/ 
<mailto:rxmurray13 at gmail.com>/. /

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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