Explosive news has broken on forced sterilization on immigrant women detained in ICE prisons, as a nurse working at the Irwin County Detention Center (privately owned by LaSalle Southwest Corrections) submitted a whistleblower report to Project South, a nonprofit dedicated to the end of poverty and genocide. According to this report, the whistleblower, listed under the name Ms. Dawn Wooten, describes detained women being sent off-site to a gynecologist in Georgia for a variety of issues (including ovarian cysts, heavy bleeding, “thick womb”) and returning to the facility having had their uteruses removed. One woman whose experience was documented in the report explains that as she was being transported to this unnamed doctor without her consent, she received three different explanations for the necessity of the procedure she was about to undergo. When she challenged the nurse who described the procedure as necessary to alleviate heavy bleeding and thick uterine lining, a symptom the detained woman had never experienced, the woman was berated. She knew at that point “the nurses’ nervous and angry response confirmed ‘that something was not right.’”
Ms. Wooten describes a slew of medical malpractice, including failing to properly inform the women of the reason for the hysterectomy, failing to provide explanation in the correct language, and as exemplified above, providing shifting and hollow explanations for why the hysterectomy was medically necessary. The report also details gruesome details about the deprioritization of cleanliness and habitability of the prisons, and the general malpractice around the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.
While news of the forced sterilization of immigrant women is new, relative to reports about the living conditions of the prison system at large, using the bodies of women of color as sites of medical aparthied is not new. Dr. Marion Simms, considered the father of modern gynecology, conducted experiments on enslaved women that have only recently become known (thanks to the foundational work by Black scholars) for their exploitative and gruesome nature. Only after four years of “perfecting” his method of correcting vaginal fissures on enslaved Black women did he begin operating on white women with the anesthesia never extended to his experimental patients. While historians debate on the consensuality of these experimentations, a modern interpretation argues that the three women who underwent countless surgeries were unable to give consent because they were enslaved and because no one at the time could fathom the extent of the procedures.
Similar to the reproductive experiments conducted in 1840s Alabama, testing for the effectiveness of birth control amongst Puerto Rican women in the 1950s stands as an example of the exploitation of poor and racialized populations for the gain of white onlookers. While birth control advocates like Margaret Sanger swore by the safety and effectiveness of the birth control pill, the experiments were charged with being neomalthusian, or having the intention of controlling the population of colonies (ahem, I mean...territories) with a racialized majority. In an attempt to lift Puerto Ricans out of their backward way of life, they would have to be the site of experimentation of new forms of population control. The U.S. government is lucky these trials were successful, though the vast history of experimentation of Black and Brown bodies would suggest they would never face any accountability for the experiment’s failure anyway.
The reports of forced hysterectomies on immigrant women represents something far more nefarious than the pursuit of medical advancement.
This is eugenics.
Compounding on the logic that an exorbitant death toll will deter future migrants from crossing into the US, stories of forced sterilization are intended to travel South to deter people from migrating to better the lives of their families and future families. The message these forced sterilizations send is quite clear: once refugees, asylum-seekers, and people who migrate for any reason pass into the US, their bodies unequivocally become property of the government.