Forced sterilisation: the latest weapon against Native Americans

by Raffaella Milandri©

Between 1970 and 1980, 42% of Native American women were sterilised against their consent. The US government’s plan was signed into law by then President Richard Nixon on 16 March 1970.

Eugenics and selection of the dominant race

Among the various instruments used by the US government to solve the so-called ‘Indian problem’ we have seen, in my previous articles, the establishment of reservations and Indian residential schools. But there are others, recent and evil. The most insidious, forced sterilisation, immediately brings to mind eugenics and Nazi laboratories.

The arrival of Darwinism exalted the racist and sexist currents that had taken hold in the early 19th century. The American scholar E. D. Cope identified four lower groups on the evolutionary scale of man: non-whites, women, southern European whites, including Italians and Jews, and the lower social classes. These currents of thought created the eugenics movement. Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, decreed that human reproduction had to be regulated to ensure that the ‘best’, especially of the upper classes, could dominate. In 1912 the first International Congress on Eugenics was held in London, which was also attended by Winston Churchill and Italian scientists inspired by Lombroso’s degenerationist theories.

Although Churchill’s tendencies have been removed from his biography, today many sources quote his speeches: ‘I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even if it has been there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for example, that a great evil has been done to the Red Indians of America or to the black people of Australia. I do not admit that harm has been done to these people because a stronger race, a higher race, a wiser race in the world has come along and taken their place’ (Speech to the Peel Commission 1937). In much of Western Europe and the United States, eugenic measures were applied from the end of the 19th century onwards: both through legislation to direct reproductive choices and through forced sterilisation and the removal of ‘negative elements’ for the race. In Italy, forced sterilisation was never approved, thanks to the opposition of the Catholic Church.

In the American eugenics movement in those years, Carl Brigham pointed out how immigration into the country was ‘going down’ in quality: less Nordic, ‘Aryan’ superior blood and more Mediterranean inferior blood. The inferior races were castigated as human parasites and ‘disgusting, un-American and dangerous’. The eugenics movement then promoted the sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ and Harry Laughlin drew up a bill for sterilisation, which was adopted in several American states. Thanks to these laws, which were expressly aimed at ‘epileptics, the mentally disabled, alcoholics, drug addicts and criminals’, at least 50,000 sterilisations were carried out in the US by 1940. But the worst was yet to come.

Even though Hitler’s actions should have put any eugenics sympathiser to shame. Regarding the sterilisation storm that swept through thousands of American women and thousands of Native American women, the US Department of Health stated in 1978: ‘Voluntary sterilisation is legal in all states. Although most states do not have statutes regulating this practice, more than half authorise the procedure through the opinions of lawyers, or decisions of judges, or rules of the Department of Health, or implicitly through the consent of those involved’. The very IHS, Indian Health Service, which was supposed to take care of the health of Native Americans, played a key part in the sterilisation of Native American women; only the repeated cries of denunciation of genocide could stop this abomination.

The United States’ so-called ‘Family Planning’

The forced sterilisation programme was allegedly discovered by members of the American Indian Movement during the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Headquarters in 1972. In 1974 a study conducted by WARN (Women of All Red Nations) concluded that up to then 42% of Native American women of childbearing age had been sterilised without consent.

On 16 March 1970 Nixon signed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act. Family Planning is understood to mean the planning of birth control, on the premise of helping a couple to have children as best they can, or not to have them if they so choose. The law was required by the government administration in July 1969, to seal a national commitment to provide adequate family planning services to all those who required it but could not afford it. President Nixon publicly stated that he was against abortion, however, and in this programme there would be no funds or services for abortion as a solution to birth control.

Since 1970, sterilisation has become the most common system of birth control for women over the age of 25 in the United States. Between 1970 and 1980, sterilisations tripled. By 1982, 15 per cent of white women, 24 per cent of African-American women, 35 per cent of Puerto Rican women and, topping the sad list, 42 per cent of Native American women had been sterilised. In the early 1970s, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 individuals, including low-income men, were sterilised annually under US government-funded programmes. As in the past, social prejudices and the ideology of a predominantly racist class allowed this to happen.

The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) denounced in a 2022 report that forced sterilisation is still legal in more than 30 US states. The procedure is authorised on the basis of the opinion of the judge, or the Attorney General, or laws of the Health and Welfare Department, or through the consent of the person concerned. In the 1970s, sterilisation was practised through loopholes: ‘consents’ wrested or played on thinly-veiled, blackmail, lies. Thus non-consensual sterilisation. Many women were classified as ‘bad girls’, or diagnosed as ‘hot-blooded’, ‘maniacal maniacs’ or ‘sexually difficult’. The Buck vs. Bell case ruled that if a state statute permitted mandatory sterilisation of the incapacitated, including the ‘mentally retarded’, for the protection and health of the state, it did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution in defence of civil rights. ‘Negative Eugenics’ intended to improve the human race by removing ‘defects’ from the genetic make-up. And it opened chasms for thousands who were sterilised against their will or persecuted as sub-humans.

The ‘womb transplant’

A young twenty-six year old Indian woman walked into the office of Dr Connie Pinkerton-Uri in Los Angeles on a November day in 1972. She asked for a ‘womb transplant’ so she could have children with her husband. A doctor from the Indian Health Service had performed a complete hysterectomy on her six years earlier, when she had a drinking problem. And he had assured her that the hysterectomy was reversible. Dr Pinkerton had to tell the weeping woman the truth: there was no such thing as a ‘womb transplant’.

Two young Indian women entered the Montana Indian Health Service hospital for appendicitis on an October day in 1970 and received a ‘free extra service’: tubal ligation. Bertha Medicine Bull, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, reports: ‘The two girls were sterilised at the age of fifteen, without consent and without telling them anything. Nor did they notify their parents’.

In a sexual harassment case in Oklahoma, at the Claremont facility, a native woman was told by social workers and other hospital staff that she was a bad mother, and that they would take her children away. They would foster her children if she did not agree to undergo sterilisation. I had the opportunity a few years ago to collect live testimonies of native victims of forced sterilisation, very young in the 1980s (for more: ‘My Tribe. Authentic stories of American Indians’, Raffaella Milandri, Mauna Kea Edizioni).

While, on the wave of the pacifist movements of ‘68 and post-Vietnam in the 1970s, American cinema began to “redeem” Indians with films such as Soldato Blu and Un uomo chiamato cavallo, finally doing justice where the “redskins” had always been “the bad guys”, the Family Planning Act of 1970 was implemented. A plan of brutal forced sterilisation against the will of Native American women, and others, between the ages of 15 and 44. After repeated protests and reports, the Government Accounting Office conducted an investigation in 1976 that resulted in the GAO Report. The GAO Report did not verify whether forced sterilisations had been carried out, but attested that there had been procedural flaws, that consent forms were not up to standard, and that doctors had not ‘understood’ the provisions. Several consent forms, moreover, had been signed the day after sterilisation. No Native American was called to testify.

Why did these sterilisations take place at the turn of the 1960s and 1980s? Not only on Indian women, but to a large extent also on African-American and Hispanic women. The US government’s reasons were social and economic. Limiting births to poor and racial minority families was ‘good’ for society and a help to poor families, who could survive better without too many children. And it limited the expenses of Medicaid, the US health care programme for the poor. Various studies, including one by Dr Choctaw-Cherokee Connie Pinkerton-Uri reveal that the Indian Health Service between 1970 and 1976 sterilised 25 to 50 per cent of Native American women between the ages of 15 and 44. Favouring women of pure Indian blood. And often using threats and blackmail, or making them sign forms during the pain of labour. Tribal Judge Marie Sanchez questioned 50 Cheyenne women and found that 26 of them had been subjected to forced sterilisation by IHS doctors. The abuse of non-consensual sterilisations plagued the entire American Indian community: an epidemic of divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse and depression brought the Native Americans to their knees for the umpteenth time, as well as endangering their survival.

Emily Moore in her studies highlights how, among Native Americans, children are vital for the family, but also for the survival of the group and tribal identity. The ‘birth control’ policy of the IHS produced a number of effects that are by no means minor: tribal communities, as their population declined, had reduced assistance and services, limited numbers of voters for elections and fewer representatives to protect them. Hence less political power to both the tribal councils and the government. Always returning, in the face of all this, is the spectre of the prime reason for the exterminations of Native Americans: land and money. Take them out once and for all, cut welfare costs and take the natural resources of the reservations. A crime perpetrated with lucidity and determination, to ‘dilute’ Indian blood into an increasingly ‘white hue.’

Published originally in Italian in The AntiDiplomatico, 23 April 2024

“Nativi” column by Raffaella Milandri

https://www.lantidiplomatico.it/news-nativi/53237/