According to Stern, many of the women sterilized in the 1960s and 1970s were mostly women with Latin American last names, poor, and immigrants with very little to no support to help navigate the American healthcare system. While there have been stories and articles covering the practice of eugenics and disproving it as a science, it continues to contribute to contemporary practices of genetic surveillance and the constant battle to legislate women’s’ bodies.
The law targeted black and brown women, predominantly Latina. According to Stern, despite the law being dissolved in the late 1970s, 146 female inmates were subjected to forced sterilization between 20. Although eugenics was debunked as a pseudoscience, it bred white supremacism, institutionalized racism, and misogyny with ripple effects throughout western history.įrom 1909 to 1979 the California eugenics law was in effect and during that time, approximately 800 tubal ligation procedures, according to statistical research, were performed on women and men without their consent. The reasoning for such legislation is deeply rooted in the work and research by eugenicist Francis Galton who believed certain genetic dispositions were superior or inferior. According to an interview with Professor Alex Stern for NPR, the “state law from 1909 authorized the surgery for people judged to have ‘mental disease,’ which may have been inherited.” To clarify, surgery meant sterilization.
In 1979, the California Eugenics Law was repealed, but it would take 24 years for the state to acknowledge this atrocious injustice aimed at poor, disabled, and predominantly women of color throughout the state.
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