This federal rule didn’t stop coercive sterilization — but it blocked contraceptive access. Can it be fixed?
Sonya Borrero didn’t learn about forced sterilization in medical school. She learned about it from a novel. She’s a historical fiction nut, and during her year as chief resident, she happened to pick up a book depicting the horrors of India’s population control program of 1975, when poor people were literally beaten up and dragged off the street into surgery. It made her wonder whether something like that had ever happened in the United States. And when she started reading about the thousands upon thousands of “unfit” American women coerced into tubal ligations and hysterectomies between the 1920s and 1970s, that gave her another dark prickle of curiosity. Was anything like that still going on?
That was how she came to be sitting in a glassy Pittsburgh conference room in the winter of 2007 and 2008, eating catered sandwiches, listening to women talking about their hopes, dreams, and sex lives in the name of research. All of them had either gotten or considered getting their tubes tied. What Borrero heard surprised her. Nationally, the sterilization rate was 22% for Black women and 15% for white women, and she’d been expecting participants of color to say they’d felt pushed toward these procedures — a subtler sort of eugenics, persisting in the way doctors spoke to their patients.
