America’s secret history of forced sterilization: Remembering a disturbing and not-so-distant past
by Jeffrey PhillipsWriting for the majority in the Supreme Court’s landmark case, Buck
v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described Charlottesville
native Carrie Buck as the “probable potential parent of socially
inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted,” writing that “her welfare and
that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.” In that ruling,
the Court found that that the Virginia Sterilization Act, under which
Carrie was sterilized, was Constitutional. Citing the best interests of
the state, Justice Holmes affirmed that Virginia’s law was valuable, and
that laws like it could prevent the country from being “swamped with
incompetence.” The Court accepted, without evidence, that Carrie and her
mother were promiscuous and that therefore, the three generations of
Bucks shared the genetic trait of feeblemindedness. Based on this
assessment, the Court found that it was in the state’s best interest to
have Carrie Buck sterilized. The ruling was considered a major victory
for eugenicists.
In Monday’s PBS documentary premiere, “No Más
Bebés,” Maria Hurtado speaks of the moment she realized that she
couldn’t have more children, “They must’ve thought, ‘this woman has so
many kids, we’ll just sew her up, so she won’t know that we did the
operation.’” Mrs. Hurtado is one of ten plaintiffs who filed a civil
rights lawsuit against doctors at the Los Angeles County USC Medical
Center, claiming that they were sterilized without their consent.
Another woman, Conseulo Hermosillo, then 23 years old, didn’t realized
that she had been sterilized until she asked her doctor for birth
control. Maria Figueroa was raising her young children in East Los
Angeles when she learned that she’d been sterilized. Dolores Madrigal
and her husband were saving up for a house and more children by working
factory jobs. When they learned that Dolores had been sterilized, her
family broke apart, as she and her husband dealt with the pain and anger
of their crushed dreams. In “No Más Bebés,” filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña
tells the story of these Mexican immigrant women who sued a powerful
hospital, county doctors, the state of California and the U.S.
Government after having been sterilized without their consent.
