Opinion: Eliminate the waiting period for sterilization covered by Medicaid
It’s time to acknowledge when a law intended to right an egregious wrong has become harmful — and change it. That’s the case for a law that requires people covered by Medicaid to wait at least 30 days after signing a consent to sterilization form to actually undergo the procedure. But there’s no waiting period for people covered by private insurance.
The rule that people seeking publicly funded sterilization must wait a month after signing consent forms for the procedure was made in response to the practice of coercive and nonconsensual sterilizations and purposeful unethical mistreatment of minoritized people. A eugenics law in California, for example, permitted providers to sterilize people they deemed unfit to reproduce. From 1919 to 1952, more than 20,000 nonconsensual sterilizations took place in that state; the law was not repealed until 1979 in state hospitals and, frighteningly, was still in effect in state prisons until 2010.
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