The U.S. used forced sterilization on different racial groups throughout history — oftentimes, secretly.
Forced sterilization happened in Mississippi and beyond. An estimated 100,000 to 150,000 poor men and women nationwide were sterilized annually under federally-funded programs, according to a 1973 lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In the Southern states, sterilization was used to control African-American populations, PBS reported.
“And folks wonder why African Americans don’t trust doctors,” a Twitter commented.
Here are five things to know about forced sterilization of Black women in Mississippi.
The sterilization law was passed in Mississippi in 1928, making it the 26th state to pass such a law. Sterilization was supposed to be used for “persons who are afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy,” The Black Detour reported.
But soon, the movement “turned towards diminishing the Black population by involuntary measures.”
Teaching hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on poor Black women. These operations came to be known as “Mississippi appendectomies,” MSNBC reported.
The term “Mississippi appendectomy” was coined by women’s rights and community activist Fannie Lou Hammer, who was unknowingly sterilized in 1961. She was given a hysterectomy during a minor surgery, according to PBS.
According to Hamer’s research, 60 percent of the Black women in Sunflower County, Mississippi, where she was forcibly sterilized, were also victims, the Workers World organization reported.
“Often the women were not told that they had been sterilized until they were released from the hospital,” Hamer said.
The medical profession has often shown disrespect for Black women’s bodies, say civil rights advocates. Black women’s bodies were treated as “state property.”
“The ‘Mississippi Appendectomy’, was the medical practice that provided involuntary sterilization to poor, Black, women who were deemed unfit to reproduce,” according to Black Women in The Black Freedom Struggle.
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Black women in Mississippi were used as guinea pigs. In the book, “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty,” Dorothy Roberts wrote, “During the 1970s, sterilization became the most rapidly growing form of birth control in the United States, rising from 200,000 cases in 1970 to over 700,000 in 1980. It was a common belief among Blacks in the South that Black women were routinely sterilized without their informed consent and for no valid medical reason. Teaching hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on poor Black women as practice for their medical residents.”
