Vol. 77/No. 32      September 9, 2013

During a five-year period ending in 2010, at least 148 pregnant women in the California Institution for Women in Corona and the Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla were pressed into agreeing to have their tubes tied, the report says.

For decades federal law has prohibited use of federal funds for sterilizations of institutionalized individuals, a protection won through fights against “eugenics” sterilization programs targeting working people.

The operations were performed using state funds, but were still illegal because they were done without authorization from state medical review committees. Prison authorities claim they were unaware of the requirement, which was made state law in 1994.

In March 2012 the prisoners’ rights group Justice Now submitted testimony to the California Senate budget subcommittee related to a range of abuses of inmates in California women’s prisons, including illegal sterilizations. “Federal and state laws,” the group testified, “prohibit sterilization in coercive environments and specifically prohibit elective sterilization in prisons, making clear that voluntary, informed consent cannot be procured in the prison environment.”

In addition to the 148 women given tubal ligations, 10 other women told Justice Now that they were improperly sterilized by other methods. Among them was Kelli Thomas, who told the Los Angeles Times that she went into surgery at Valley State for a biopsy and to remove two cysts. She gave the doctor permission to remove her ovaries if cancer was found. Although no cancer was present, her ovaries were taken out.

Crystal Nguyen, 28, a former Valley State inmate who worked in the prison’s infirmary in 2007, told the Center for Investigative Reporting that she often overheard medical staff asking inmates who had served multiple prison terms to agree to be sterilized. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s not right,’” Nguyen said. “Do they think they’re animals, and they don’t want them to breed anymore?”

In an interview with CIR, Dr. James Heinrich, Valley State Prison’s gynecologist, said he saw the sterilizations as an important service for poor women who faced potential health risks.

But Heinrich’s comments on the $147,460 in state funds paid for the operations betray an attitude of contempt for working-class women. “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money,” he said, “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more.”

Medical care at the state’s 33 prisons has been under the California Prison Health Care Receivership Corp. since 2006, after a U.S. district judge ruled that the system’s health care was so poor that it violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Meanwhile, the North Carolina state legislature agreed July 25, after 10 years of debate, to award some $50,000 to each victim of that state’s involuntary sterilization program, under which more than 7,000 people deemed “feeble-minded,” “promiscuous,” or in other ways “unfit” were sterilized between 1929 and 1974.

Thirty-three states had similar “eugenics” programs during much of the 20th century.
 
 
Related article:
Calif. inmates press hunger strike in fight against long-term isolation
 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home