California Prisons Coerced Women Into Sterilization

If you thought that the days of eugenics were ancient history, you would be terribly mistaken. The Center for Investigative Reporting has revealed that between 2006 and 2010, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation coercively sterilized approximately 150 women. In violation of prison rules, tubal ligations were performed on female inmates during labor and childbirth without their consent. It is estimated that at least 100 more were performed going back to the late 1990s. From 1997 to 2010, California taxpayers paid contracting physicians $147,460 to sterilize women at prisons in Corona and Chowchilla.

Prison medical staff coerced pregnant women who were deemed likely to return to prison in the future. Working in the infirmary in 2007, Crystal Nguyen overheard medical staff asking inmates who had served multiple prison terms to agree to be sterilized. Nguyen reacted with disgust: “Do they think they’re animals, and they don’t want them to breed anymore?”  (more...)

California Prisons Coerced Women Into Sterilization