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Sterilization: 'It's for your own good'

By Richard B. Muhammad -Editor- | Last updated: Jul 11, 2013 - 8:39:24 PM

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(FinalCall.com) - Revelations by the California-based, The Center for Investigative Reporting stated that female inmates were sterilized are a reminder of how vulnerable it is to be poor, Black, Brown, Asian and female in America.

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According to the center, about 150 women in the custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation were sterilized between 2006 and 2010. The sterilizations were performed by doctors under contract with the corrections department. Doctors were paid $147,460 between 1997 and 2010, the center reports. It adds, “At least 148 women received tubal ligations in violation of prison rules during those five years—and there are perhaps 100 more dating back to the late 1990s, according to state documents and interviews.”

The victims, who were signed up while pregnant and in prison, and advocates say medical staff coerced the inmates into having tubal ligations. Doctors and medical professionals insist the operations were only “offered” when inmates may have been at risk because of multiple pregnancies, “with a history of at least three C-sections,” and where more children could have resulted in dangerous and possibly fatal complications. Some medical workers in the prisons also said they didn’t know about restrictions on sterilizations based on past abuses and the need to get state clearance.

But there was also another mindset at work, one that apparently felt keeping these throwaway women from having more babies made economic sense. According to the center, Dr. James Heinrich,  who was involved with ob/gyn  services for Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, Calif., says he never pressured anyone. He added that the nearly $150,000 in reported spending for the procedures was a pittance. “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money,” Center for Investigative Reporting writer Corey G. Johnson quoted Dr. Heinrich as saying, “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children—as they procreated more.”

Those words and such thinking are as old as the Bible with questions about whether any good could come out of Nazareth and one wonders if Mary, a single mother on her own, would have been deemed worthy of having a child.

Whether certain women are worthy of having children is deeply ingrained in this country. When Blacks were brought here in chains, the idea was to work us to death. Then there was the business proposition that we could be bred and sold like animals for profit. Our enslavers and oppressors saw few moral problems with these acts. 

When Margaret Sanger came around in the 1900s, the innocuous term “birth control” was created but part of the mission was sterilization of those unfit to reproduce. “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities.  The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” she said in 1922.

Black women were the victims of sterilizations in states across the country and the propaganda was always the same: This is for your own good.

Black women in North Carolina were nearly half of the victims in a state sterilization program. “Between 1929 and 1974, an estimated 7,600 people were sterilized by choice, force or coercion under the authority of the N.C. Eugenics Board program. The exact number of victims alive today is unknown. However, the State Center for Health Statistics estimates that 2,944 victims may be living as of 2010,” according to the N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation.

Native American women in Puerto Rico were subjected to mass sterilization as part of this nation’s sorry history.

Today Project Prevention, based in North Carolina, promises $300 to women with drug problems or in desperate conditions to get sterilized, get implanted with IUDs or take birth control shots. The group proclaimed January 2012 was a “major milestone,” with 4,000 women having accepted their anti-pregnancy bounty. The pain of such births hits “unknowing taxpayers” who could pay $561 million to $1.2 billion for 4,000 offspring of addicts who receive varied government assistance for 18 years. Project Prevention says it spent $1.2 million to prevent “disastrous pregnancies” and free up money for drug treatment and other good things.

The trouble is these birth control death plots are never for our benefit. They are efforts to destroy a people who were never wanted in the first place. You can’t say you want to avoid the suffering of children and never repair 450 years of damage to their community and ongoing oppression suffered by their parents.

(Final Call editor-in-chief Richard B. Muhammad can be reached at editor@ finalcall.com. You can also follow him on Facebook and @RMfinalcall on Twitter.)