Forced Sterilization Is Not a Relic of the Past
This article features Government Accountability Project’s whistleblower client, Dawn Wooten, and was originally published here.
The words “forced sterilization” bring to mind shameful stories from the American past.
The eugenics movement of the early 20th century promoted the notion that the way to improve the human race was to ensure that “undesirables” would not have children. Untold numbers of poor people, immigrants, and Black women were subjected to unwanted medical procedures that made them sterile. Women who were too interested in sex were sometimes in this category as well.
The Supreme Court made the procedure legal in 1927. In the case of one indigent Virginia girl, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes decreed, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
But forced sterilization is not simply an artifact of the past. Shocking allegations surfaced last year when Dawn Wooten, a nurse who worked at an ICE immigrant detainment center in Georgia, filed a whistleblower complaint, working with the human rights group Project South.
The complaint charged that women in the facility had “been sterilized en masse without proper consent or medical necessity. Numerous women described being coerced into surgery and confused as to why the procedure was performed. Some described being yelled at by medical staff when they resisted the procedure. Many explained that they felt as if ICE was ‘experimenting with [their] bodies.’”
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