Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Forced Sterilization

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

Many were shocked to learn of allegations of forced sterilizations at an ICE facility. In this episode, we explore the long American history of this practice and the heartbreaking truth that this latest incident is just the latest in a long string of clinical genocide by those in power. 

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. I'm I'm I'm I'm

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I'm I'm I'm I'm for the mouth. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Salbo. It's a battle tour of misguided medicine. I'm your co-host, Justin McAroy. And I'm Sydney McAroy. Sid, no cute intro this week. It's been, I mean, it's just been one fresh hell after another recently. And this is a, you know, it's always thrilling when one of those fresh hills stumbles into solvents territory. There's so many. I wouldn't say thrilling. Thrilling is not the right word. No. If there's an opposite, why can't they come up with an

opposite of thrilling? Come on point Dexter's English majors. It's 2020. It's 2020. It's the opposite of thrilling. But I mean upsetting, disturbing. See, I don't think you're there yet. We'll find something I'm sure. Well, I and I should say at the top of this episode that we're going to be talking about the recent, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, doing procedures on inmates without their consent, without their informed consent, to render them incapable of having children. And we're gonna talk about that, and we're also gonna talk about the history of that

in this country. And so I feel like we should say that right at the beginning, because these are... You're able to handle right now, you know, I get it. A lot of these, we're going to go through the history, a lot of these crime specifically have been committed against black indigenous and people of color

in this country, as well as the people that physically disabled, the mentally disabled. And I do want to clarify one of the thing the people, the physically disabled, the mentally disabled. And I do want to clarify one of the things before we get too much further. Sydney did say, and ice run facility and not a nice run facility like it sounded because that was very confusing for me personally until I sort of parked it.

Sydney does not think that this place is nice run. US immigration and customs enforcement, ICE ICE facility. But not a nice run facility. She doesn't think that. I don't want people snipping this out. Before you know it, it'll be their text message alert

is you saying it's a nice run facility where there's forced sterilization. This is a whole like adventure time, ice, king, nice, king thing. You're right, exactly, right? Yes. No, I am, and I think a lot of people have heard these recent.

And I, by the way, enforcing this joke for all it's worth because I don't think there's a- It's the only one for episode. a lot of them in this episode. So let me just have this and then I'll move on. Here is why I think that it's important that we talk about it, which I think for a lot of people is self-evident, but to just reinforce why this is not new for the United States. As shocking and upsetting and horrifying as it is to hear what is happening

in this detention center, I think that it is important, if uncomfortable, for us to all reckon with the fact that the United States has been engaging in this for essentially as long as we knew how to do these procedures. You don't wanna think you live in that country, but you do, sorry. Yes, I saw a lot of people saying, you know, there have been comparisons, I think for quite a while,

under this administration to Nazi Germany, and a lot of people are saying see, like this is proof, but I think the important thing to understand is we were doing this before Nazi Germany existed. Right. So, we've talked about this some on our eugenics episode because all of this is tied into the history of eugenics.

It's just the two are pretty inextricable. But I want to go, I want to specifically focus on how we have used the procedures that will infertility, whether we're talking about things like tubal ligations or hysterectomies or vasectomies, some sort of procedure so that the person who has had it performed can no longer give birth or have a child. Yeah. Parents a child. Okay. So, if you're not aware, there is a nurse at a Georgia detention facility named Don Wooten

who has revealed that in the last, I think, four years, multiple patients, their multiple clients there, I guess, multiple of those who have been incarcerated have been subject to hysterectomies, which already is a little shocking, because that isn't, even if you were seeking a procedure to stop fertility, you typically aren't going to have a hysterectomy performed. Real quick, what's a hysterectomy?

To remove the uterus and perhaps also ovaries, it depends, but that is not. Usually, if you are going in specifically, if you have a uterus and you have ovaries and fallopian tubes and you're going in to have a surgical procedure only so that you will not have children. Soly to stop the ability of you having children, you wouldn't need to remove all of that to do that.

You could do something called a tubal ligation, which is a way of just simply blocking off the fallopian tubes so that the sperm cannot fertilize the egg. You don't need to remove everything, which is a much more invasive procedure with a lot, especially if you're moving the ovaries with a lot of other kind of medical things you need to do, a lot of follow up and management afterwards. So that already is a little, why, what are we doing here? The allegations are that many have been coerced into the procedure by either simply abusing like a language barrier that existed, just not explaining it in a way the patient would understand

what was happening, happening with holding information as to like what exactly what this surgery was, specifically the reversibility. There's a lot of misunderstanding that well if you get a tube of ligation you can always just get it reversed if you want to, if you get a tubal ligation, you can always just get it reversed. If you want it, if you change your mind. And the truth is, while yes, there are procedures that can attempt to do that. If you have a tubal ligation done, it is permanent. The understanding is this is a permanent decision to not have children. It should never be phrased as something you could get undone. Similar to the vasectomy you had. Yes. Did the doctor look at you and say, but you can always undo it. If he did, I worry I might instinctually punch him in the mouth. So let's hope that he didn't.

So, and then also by insinuations that maybe things will go a little easier on you in terms of the legal aspects of all of this, if you go along with what we're saying here. I'm not going to get into all the specifics so far. I think we're early into understanding exactly the nature of what happened to each individual patient. I don't think we know all of that information yet. And some of the things I've seen tweeted from other individuals are pretty shocking and upsetting. So I don't know exactly what happened, but I think one way or another, it sounds like a

gynecologist at this facility who has been referred to in some reports as the uterus collector was doing an abnormally large number of hysterectomies on patients who did not know that that's what was happening, which is abuse and assault, frankly. So of course, ice has not admitted to this charge. This is still, this is a, you know, this is going to go to court. And I think there should be an investigation. I think, obviously, hopefully, if you have a soul, you would agree that this needs to be thoroughly investigated to figure out who did what and let's stop them. And I mean, I've seen a lot of people

call for if this is true of this kind of college, just they need to lose their license. Well, they need to be in jail. Yeah. I mean, that's it. This is criminal. This is not just like, oh, you were a bad doctor. I mean, that's it. This is criminal. This is not just like, oh, you were a bad doctor. I mean, you were. But this is also pretty bad. Yes. Very bad. The now, when we go into, and again, if you think like, well,

there's no way this is happening in the United States of America, this is kind of the purpose of this episode, it's to say, well, OK, if we go to the earliest examples of this in this country, we usually are targeting with these practices, like as an institution, as a state. We're usually targeting people who the state has decided the people in power have decided should not continue to reproduce. They have deemed them undesirable to reproduce. And so you see specific groups being targeted over and over again. One that we have already, a lot of the early laws focused on was anybody who had any sort of physical disability, someone who was deemed feeble-minded is the term that

was used a lot of the time. And that could encompass a lot of different things. Anyone who they didn't want to have children could have been deemed feeble-minded. So you'll see that I hate you even use a word diagnosis because it doesn't mean anything. But that was what the doctors were saying. But then also to target specific racial groups. And again, when we think about like the modern eugenics movement, and by modern, I mean, not ancient history. So we're really talking about the late 1800s, early 1900s when we say modern. A lot of people associate that with Nazi Germany, but it's important to remember.

And we talked about this in the Eugenics episode. A lot of it started here in the US. Right. A lot of the original thinkers who wrote the books and sort of laid out the framework for this were United States, I guess scientists, we could call them. There were the Fitter Family Contests here in the US in the 1920s. We've talked about that before, but you could go to the State Fair and just like you could show your prize pig or cow or whatever, you could display your family and you would bring along like your pedigree, all of your family tree and like what diseases you didn't have

and everybody would sit there and take pictures and it started with a better baby contest and then it ended with a fitter family contest and it was the fittest family. That's disgusting, obviously. But how did you get your kids to do that? Like, the amount of standing still and just being still that would require,

I don't know, maybe I don't know what, maybe things were just so much more boring back then that that was like real entertainment. I guess they wouldn't be asking for an iPad, but wow, those are some well-behaved kids in your, in your monstrous display there. If it's like our fairs, you just promise them they can go look at the giant pumpkins afterwards.

Yes. Look how big that pumpkin is. I'll let you fill a huge tube full of different colored sugars. That's what I'm fused. So part of it initially was- That's two jokes. Trying to encourage people to breed.

I mean, I know this sounds like a perverse way of talking about human relationships and things like intimacy and deciding to have children, but this is the way the eugenics movement looked at humans. Let's say this upfront eugenics bad don't like it very bad. We're going to be reciting, you're going to be reciting not we, you're going to be reciting some different positions that have been taken by this movement. You do not need us every sentence to come up with a value judgment for you.

So sure no, we're we're at on eugenics. Let me just say it up front. No good, very bad. Don't do it. Exactly. And they would encourage people that they thought had desirable traits to seek out others with those desirable traits in order to breed. And then they would, the flip side of that was we we would prefer, as the eugenicist would prefer, if people who had undesirable traits, and whatever they deemed undesirable was undesirable, would not have children. And this initially could only be done through, like, It could only be done through trying to get people, well, don't have sex. But that's not a very successful. I think we know by now in the United States of America that telling people not to have sex

doesn't work. But once there were surgical procedures to do this, this is where this movement really starts to take place. Initially, the thought was that if somebody is having a child and they say, and like, initially this was just thought in the case of a C-section, you say that, I know this is the last kid I want to have. I don't want to have any more kids. There was initially this thought, well,

after they have the kid, maybe you could do a hysterectomy, just remove their uterus, and then that person doesn't have to have any more children. That was kind of the first thought of a surgical infertility procedure. In 1880, in Toledo, Ohio, Dr. Lungren did the first what we know as a tubal ligation procedure. So instead of-

That's precisely having the tubes tied, is that right? Well, there are different ways you can go about it. When we say tubes tied, I think a lot of people assume like they just cut them and tie them off. Initially, you could just cauterize them. So a lot of these early procedures were actually removing the tubes in a sense. They were destroying the tubes. So you could remove the tubes, you could removing the tubes in a sense. They were destroying the tubes.

So you could remove the tubes, you could destroy the tubes, you could occlude them with clips. There are lots of different ways to accomplish this goal. In the early procedures, it was easiest just to destroy them, cauterize them. And again, the procedure has undergone many, many changes since then. But the idea is that we are occluding, we're blocking off these tubes to permanently remove fertility. Other methods of birth control like oral contraceptives and the shot that you can get the depot

shot didn't come along until the 50s. So tubal ligation was an option before it was that and we had condoms and barrier methods and things, but we didn't have these other medications that were easier to take and more widely applicable until, and yeah, exactly less permanent in the 50s. The eugenics movement of the early 1900s saw these procedures and thought, okay, we can use this new technology, this new surgical procedure to stop people from having children. Initially, like I said, they had just encouraged people not to have sex. That didn't work.

Then they tried to pass laws to prevent certain types of marriages that they thought would produce inadequate offspring. That doesn't work because sex and marriage are not the same thing. And so then they said, well, let's institutionalize everybody through all of their childbearing years so that they can't reproduce. Well, that's pricey. So the way that the surgery came in was, oh, this is perfect. We can label someone, usually initially it was feeble-minded. We can label someone feeble-minded. We can put them in an institution because we've labeled them feeble-minded. We can force them to have this procedure done, and then we can just release

them whenever, because one, if we don't institutionalize them forever saves money, and two, we have protected the interests of society because now they can't pass along. The genetic material. Exactly. And so this became the kind of, this was the way that people were handled in the United States from the first law that was passed in Indiana in 1907. Soon 30 states would pass laws that basically allowed you to force sterilization upon someone who you felt was not genetically suitable to bear children, who would not be conducive to the interests of society. These were, now as you can imagine, as they started doing this, taking people from their homes for whatever reason. Doctors could give this diagnosis and institutionalized people.

People were sent there if their families just didn't like the way they behaved. Obviously, unmarried women who became pregnant were often targets of this as well. Then, again, as I said, the disabled were immediately targeted by these laws, but you could put people in institutions, sterilize them, and then you were done. There were legal challenges that immediately arose as these laws were passed throughout the country. And the decision that we've talked about before, Buck V. Bell in 1927 by the Supreme Court

kind of put it to rest. There was a young woman named Carrie Buck, who was being held in an institution again for this diagnosis, feeble-minded. Her mother had also been diagnosed with this and Carrie had become pregnant out of wedlock, which was already a strike against her at this time. It also was probably the result of a sexual assault. So after she had her child, they institutionalized her and said, you know, her mother was feeble-minded, she's feeble-minded. This child probably is. And the doctors there felt like this would be the case

to take to the Supreme Court. This would be the case that they could use to lay the groundwork to allow these forced sterilizations in the United States for as many reasons as they wanted. So this court was challenged. It did go to the Supreme Court and the final decision as quoted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, three generations of imbosols is enough. And so they decided that it is okay. If in the interest of the state, we need to sterilize someone with disabilities, with a lower cognitive ability and it opened the door for with undesirable skin color,

whatever our decision is, we are allowed to do that in an eight to one decision. And so as of 1927, it became easy for states to begin to engage in this activity. There's a lot more to talk about, but let's take a quick break before we do. Probably the happiest you've ever been to hear marketing messages

that hear in this brief oasis of commercialism. Let's go to the building department. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that ask you lift my car before the mouth. Say, don't, I feel like we're just getting, I mean, we just made it. It's why Yield that that recently ate to, you really need to re-evaluate the country that you think you live in when that recently eight of the Supreme Court justices

thought that like this was fine. This was fine. I think it's really, we'll get to this point, but I think it's really, again, it's important if you wanna understand everything that's happening today. It's important to understand that not too long ago, the idea of eugenics, the idea that it was okay to surgically force people not to reproduce because you didn't like the traits they might

pass on. And the idea that there is a perfect or master race is not that old and it took hold really firmly in this country. Yeah, and we're going to get to. Not on American. No, it's not. It's pretty uniquely American. We're going to get to a pretty big reason why it did take a downturn. Before that, I think this sort of shocked me too. The state that pursued this most heavily initially

was actually California. So California passed... Not the hippie paradise it is today. No, they passed their own law in 1909. And a lot of these laws that were passed throughout the country were pretty similar, just allowing the state can sterilize somebody if it is in their best, if they are deemed not capable

of raising a child. So they passed their loan 1909 and a lot of it, here is where it gets tied to if people can't take care of themselves and they're living in poverty. Then the idea at this time is that maybe that's some sort of genetic thing. The eugenicist thought, maybe it's all tied in there. Maybe there's something wrong with the DNA of these people who can't seem to pay their rent, feed their kids. There's something there. And there was also tied to criminality for a while as well, although this was a much looser association. And it was really, the eugenicist had a really hard time trying to prove that part of it.

They tried really hard though, that you could find the gene for poor, the gene for murderer, and then just eliminate these people from society. But because of that tie-in to poverty, you see a lot of migrant workers in California who were initially targeted by these laws. So the people who were forced to have these procedures done initially were heavily the Latino population and the Asian population. So they were the victims of this early on. And I think that it would be very naive to say,

but it was just because they were the ones who were poor. I think there was also, I mean, it was written a very strong bias towards, let's stop anyone who's not white from reproducing. So basically, they would coerce these patients who were already in hospitals. Maybe they had just had a child or they had been put into some sort of institution because they were diagnosed with something. They would then coerce them once they were there into the procedure or just do it. You know, sometimes it was like talking them into it or then sometimes they just did the procedure. They also used it in prisons very frequently, especially the vasectomy was used a lot in prisons. Again, with the idea that we could stop criminal behavior

by stopping these people from reproducing. About 80% of the country's forced sterilizations before 1921 were done in California. Yikes. So another early attempts at this same kind of, again, I think, from a eugenics perspective, was in actually Puerto Rico. In 1937, they passed law 116, which the idea was, it was a last law, last eugenics law, passed in the United States or a territory thereof, and it was aimed at curbing the population. So the idea was Puerto Rico is living in poverty, many of the people there, and it's because

there's too many people. And so if we can limit the number of people, then we can fix poverty was again the argument. But by the time this law would be repealed in 1960, about 37% of women of child barri-n-age had been sterilized. So a third of people who could give birth in Puerto Rico had been sterilized. They were not told the procedure was permanent. Many were threatened.

This was one story I would hear is that one tactic that doctors would use is if someone came into the hospital in labor to deliver a baby, they would say, we will not let you in and assist you in this delivery unless you agree to have this procedure done after you have this child. So they would threaten them with lack of medical care, not just in Puerto Rico. This happened in the US as well, of course. But eugenicist leaders in the US would actually fly, would actually bring Puerto Rican doctors to New York to train them in these procedures and send them back in order to curb the population of Puerto Rico and stop them from reproducing. Sterilizations across the U.S. were becoming more popular and started targeting black people

in the south, Mexican immigrants, Asian immigrants, certainly indigenous people through the Indian health services were being targeted with these efforts. There is a brief pause in this eugenics narrative, in this forced sterilization narrative in the country, for two reasons. One is that in 1942, the Supreme Court ruled that, look, if we're going to do this on criminals, if we are going to, and when I say criminals, I mean, people who have been put in jail, who the state believes have committed a crime, whether or not that is true.

But if we're going to do that to people who are incarcerated, we have to do it to all of them because of equal protection. So what the Supreme Court at least recognized is that when we're talking about how they were doing these procedures on people who are incarcerated and returned for like pleadials and things like that, they were targeting black people and brown people. White color criminals. We're not being subjected to these forced procedures or these deals. And so what the Supreme Court said was, look, if we really believe the committing a crime is a genetic trait and you can stop it through forced sterilization,

right? Exactly. And so that put up. Yeah, I love it. Listen, don't get it twisted. We're wild about these four sterilizations here on the Supreme Court, 15 years. We've been loving these things. We just want it to be sterilized the white people to. It's got to be everybody's getting sterilized.

We're not second guessing the four sterilization we're wild about it, but it's gotta be everybody. It's gotta be more everybody. The other big dent in the Eugenics movement was the Nazis. It's one of those things where as you're laying this out, you have to understand a lot of Americans were not outraged by any of this so far. They were not, this was not being fought.

It was being disputed in scientific journals. I mean, they were definitely like, you know, scientists and people in that field going, I don't know that any of this makes sense. This eugenic stuff. I don't know that it really holds, but like as a whole, the American people were saying, like, well, if somebody's not capable of raising a child, maybe this is just what we need. We also don't know we're not historians. We don't know the extent to which, or time travelers, we don't know the extent to which the American people was paying attention to this. I mean, like,

sure. We didn't suddenly lose our taste for it because we went to war with the Nazis. I think that we saw the Nazis and had to define ourselves in opposition to them. All right, because they were exactly the all and anything that they were representative of we we probably were looking in ourselves like when we know that they're and I think that a lot of it was seen if I had to guess again, this is pure conjecture, but seen the Nazis take a lot of these eugenics arguments to the logical extreme probably or to the, I think that's on, yeah, probably made a lot of people lose their taste for it because it takes it out of theory and it reminds you that, oh, these are actual human lives that you are, you

know, moving around on a chess board trying to get the perfect person. That's exactly what seems to have happened because after Americans saw what was happening, we literally saw pictures of what was happening in Nazi Germany, I think that the idea of preventing pregnancy did not seem so bad, but then once you realize, like, well, if we continue this, we're murdering, then murder is the result.

Right. Genocide. This is genocide. And what we're doing is genocide, it just doesn't seem as bad because it's in an operating room and it's clean and sterile. It's genocide, it's genocide. But it's a genocide. So, after World War II, the numbers dropped of these forced sterilizations, but you see

a resurgence of this later. There was a brief pause, and then, like, as we move into the later years of the 50s, actually, it's funny, I was looking at West Virginia history specifically to see what our state, I don't know that history in our state, and we were not big on the forced sterilizations, we participated, but our state was not responsible for tons of them, but like 55, I think, was the peak year for us or something. I'm sorry, folks, and this is somewhere right from my wife. I still think 55 is too many.

No, 1955 was the year. Oh, okay. Got it. Sorry. No, but in the later 50s into the 60s, you start to see these ideas start to come back and that really won't subside. And we'll get into this until like the late 70s

when all this stuff is challenged again. But again, I want to speak to a couple other, we talked about this original idea of like, you're disabled, so we don't want you to reproduce, was kind of where it started. Either you have a physical disability or developmentally delayed something like that. It quickly branched out into certain racial groups. And specifically in the American South, black people were targeted. This started all the way back when these laws were initially

passed. North Carolina actually created a eugenics board back in the 30s. And that would add heavily North Carolina committed a lot of these forced sterilizations because of this eugenics board aimed largely at black women, but black people in general, black men too. And they eventually have actually paid like settlements to people since then and the year since then because

of this. But in Southern states, doctors would take advantage of a lack of literacy and medical understanding to manipulate people into these procedures without actually forcing them, that's the other thing. As you see the eugenics movement from a very, oh, I'm doing this to you because the state doesn't want you to have kids to backhanded ways of preventing people, coercing people or just taking advantage of the fact

that they don't understand. So one important trial that brought light to a lot of what was happening in the South was in 1973. There were three young black women, Katie Marialis and Minneley Relf, who were 17, 14 and 12. And their mother brought them to the doctor and was told that they could all get birth control shots. The shot was available and she said, that's okay, that's good. I want them to get the birth control shot. Now, the oldest sister, Katie got

the shot, which by the way was still, and this is a whole other history, it was still in trials was still experimental to begin with. But the older sister Katie got the shot as well as an IUD that her mother didn't know about an intrauterine device to prevent pregnancy. The younger two, Mary Alice and Minnie Lee, got two beleigations performed without their mother's consent against their will without any explanation that the doctor was permanently removing their ability to have children. And we're talking about like a level of health literacy. All the mother had signed on the form was an ex Nobody gave consent. And this was this case when it was brought forward led to the discovery that between a hundred thousand and 150,000 people in the South,

Black people in the South were subject to forced sterilizations through these tactics. You could just take advantage of the fact that they don't know what the piece paper they're signing says. Just lie to them. Tell them it's, oh, well, we can reverse it always if you ever change your mind, or threaten that we'll take away your government benefits if you don't get this done. This was a common tactic. So the, you see the eugenics movement into, move into this like, well, it's not that we don't want you to reproduce, it's that we don't want to pay for it. So this is really a financial thing. That was the justification. Similarly, Native American people were subject to the same treatment through the Indian Health Service.

In 1970, Title 10 was passed, which is the family, the population research and voluntary family planning program, which was to help, in part, use federal funds to pay for certain services, certain health care services. The result for the Indian Health Services, for our indigenous population is between 1970 and 1976, between 25 and 42% of women of reproductive age who came in seeking health care services had sterilization performed. Again, the concept of informed consent doesn't really apply because who knows what the doctor was specifically saying what they were explaining Was it reversible or not nobody was ever told these things and in some cases it was completely blatant

There were two young women who were brought in for appendectomies and while they were there they They had a sterilization procedure performed without anyone knowing this was happening The Same thing again again, in California, took it back to California. There was a 1975 case in which 10 Latina women sued a hospital for sterilization without consent. Same thing, they were not told that this was permanent, they were not told, they were coerced into this happening.

So you see these abuses happening, they were not told, they were coerced into this happening. So you see these abuses happening again, now targeted, not so, I mean, I don't want to say that disabled people weren't being targeted because certainly that can, you know, the rights of disabled people are still in jeopardy in this country to this day. But you see these specific abuses aimed at certain racial groups that are deemed less desirable to reproduce. So all of these cases in the 70s kind of, it came to a head. I don't know if it was that we can say we realize this was occurring or it came to light to the point where we couldn't deny

it was occurring anymore as a collective as a society. A central figure in this effort is Dr. Helen Rodriguez Trias who had worked, lived and worked in both New York and Puerto Rico and understood all of the abuse that was occurring very well in Puerto Rico and helped to form the committee to end sterilization abuse. And through their efforts along with help from the ACLU, and there were some studies published from the CDC that kind of shed light on a lot of this stuff, they advocated to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which is now the HHS Health

and Human Services, to change the guidelines and requirements for this procedure. And this is where, if you've ever wondered why there seem to be more regulations surrounding sterilizations procedure specifically, this is where this comes from. So the committee guidelines required a 30-day waiting period between when you would sign consent for the procedure and when you would have the procedure done. The idea being that nobody can talk you into it in that moment

because they're threatening you, they're trying to take something away from you because you're vulnerable, maybe you're sick or have just given birth or something like that. The idea being that they'll give you time to really think about it and make sure that it is what you wanted and not just what the state or the doctor wanted. And during that time, they also said, you know, these people should be offered counseling services that they have to be provided in the right language so that you can't use that

as a way to not fully inform someone. And it wouldn't be the doctors. We're going to get somebody else in there who, because the doctors unfortunately could not be trusted because of their complicity in this historically, not every single doctor, but certainly there were doctors who were complicit in this. As part of that, the patient had to be able to, by the end of it, explain exactly what was happening to them that they understood its permanence and they had an awareness

of what they had agreed to. They became effective on November 1st, 1975, initially it applied only to New York. This is where this started, but eventually the rest of the country would be pressured to follow suit. There were more lawsuits in different places. And, you know, federal national guidance began to kind of enforce this concept, along with the fact that federal funds were not, they were prohibited from being used for forced sterilization procedures as well. And so this should have put an into it. Like at this time, all this, all this effort in the late 70s should have put an into this.

But what we have found, as recently as a report from 2005 to 2013 in California state prisons, showed that 132 women had tubal ligations performed without appropriate consent. There were records that were falsified, there were records that were removed. Again, many of the patients came forward and said we were not told that it was permanent or we were told that we had to do this for various reasons, legal reasons, or again, benefits or something. They were coerced into doing it. One of the doctors who was responsible for a good percentage of these procedures made the comment that the money that these procedures cost, these sterilizations procedures cost was minimal compared to what

you save in welfare, paying for these unwanted children as they procreated more, which is the language of eugenics. Yeah, I mean mean pure and simple. Yes, there's nothing hidden about that. A lot of these modern eugenics, and by modern now, I mean today, efforts focus on, we want to prevent pregnancy because we don't feel like you can support children financially.

And so it's not in the interest of some sort of genetic race, master race thing. It's in the interest of the state to save money. I mean, it's the argument. But can you pick a worse one right now? What's the worst one, Sid? Can you actually choose? I actually am sitting or trying to choose. I can't choose. I don't know. It's all bad. There's no good reasons for eugenics. I think we are settled in the back early in the show. But I think that like the when you start to try to paint it different ways. Yeah, you don't recognize it.

You don't recognize it right away. And I think it's important to strip it away and say at the end of the day, whether it's because, I mean, because this has been used, we talked about this in the Eugenics episode. In recent court cases, judges have said like a condition of your parole is a vasectomy. Yeah.

I mean, that's, I mean, if you strip it all away the we're practicing eugenics. That's what this all of this is so when you hear these allegations from Don Wooten Do you think that this is probably true? Yeah, I mean why would we think it was a true? Yeah, it seems true. I mean we have a we doing it. It seems more true now at the end of this episode than it did at the beginning. We know we have seen the statistic multiple places that because of that buck VBEL decision

that 70,000 sterilizations were done without consent or against consent, how many more have been done that we don't know? I mean, that's the thing. How many more have been done using these sorts of tactics where, look, maybe we let you go if or maybe you'll maybe we'll go a little easier on you if I think what the Ralph Sisters in 73, right? They found that out and it led to a hundred thousand people who'd had this done like who knows what we've missed.

And I think it is, it bears a brief mention too. The problem is, because we've had to try to put all these regulations around these procedures to protect people, so that vulnerable populations aren't subject to them against their will, the flip side is that we've also made it more difficult for people who want to have these procedures done to go get them done freely. There were states where you had to get, if you are a woman seeking one of these procedures,

you have to get your husband's signature, assuming you have one, I guess, to have these procedures performed. To this day, there are still private hospitals who require those sorts of things that you like see a psychologist first and write an essay about why you want to have this done. And even now, there still is that waiting period in place.

If you're going to have, it depends on your insurance. If you have private insurance, it's not always the truth. But depending on your insurance, if you do have Medicaid, there is a waiting period between when you sign the form and when you can have the procedure done. And all these things were put in place, again, for good reasons, to try to protect people. But the flip side is that it has removed autonomy over our bodies

in another direction. And again, a lot of this tends to be aimed over and over again at black, indigenous, and people of color in this country. And specifically at this moment, when we have seen so much racist rhetoric used against people trying to immigrate to the United States, it is hard to imagine that it isn't true, that this would be leveled against people who are being detained in these inhumane fashions, like the concentration camps on our borders, that this wouldn't be happening in one of our facilities. We have the whole history, why wouldn't it be? Thank you for listening. We know it's a tough one, so thank you for sticking through it. I guess vote would be the thing that I would say. I think voting is part of what we need to do, of course.

Of course, of course, I'm not removing that. But I think that I don't understand why every headline isn't the United States continues to participate in eugenics and human rights abuses. And we need to stop it now. Well, we've had kids and cages for months. I mean, it, you know, and where's the outrage? It's just, I mean, we're inundated with stuff like this. I mean, it doesn't surprise me that this,

people wouldn't be taking to the streets. And we should mention, by the way, like, and this has only occurred to me now, but like, we're not in any way trying to normalize by contextualizing. You know what I mean? No. No, my point is simply that if you find these, because there are people who are saying,

well, do we really know? Well, let's investigate. Let's see if this is really true. You have no reason to think it isn't because we've been engaging in these types of activities for as long as we've been able to do them. So I am simply trying to provide the context that it is completely believable. It is sadly and disturbingly believable that this is happening. Thank you for listening.

Thanks to the taxpayers for the use. There's some medicines as the intro now to our program. Thanks to you for being with us. And be sure to join us again next week for a solbona and spend until then, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. As always, don't drill a whole in your head. Alright! Maximumfun.org

Comedy and Culture Artist-owned? Audience-supported. Hi, my name is Graham Clark and I'm one half of the podcast stop podcasting yourself. I show that we've recorded for many many years and at the moment instead of being in person we're recording remotely and you wouldn't even notice, you don't even notice the lag. That's right Graham and the great thing about it.

Go ahead. No, you go ahead. Okay. Go ahead. And you can listen to us every week on maximumfun.org or wherever you get your podcasts, your podcasts.