Sterilization of Native American women

Common card · No. 379072

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian Health Service (IHS) and collaborating physicians sustained a practice of performing sterilizations on Native American women, in many cases without the free and informed consent of their patients. Tactics for sterilization included healthcare providers neglecting to tell women they were going to be sterilized and forms of coercion such as threatening to take away welfare or healthcare. In some cases, women were misled into believing that the sterilization procedure was reversible. In yet other cases, sterilization was performed without the adequate understanding and consent of the patient, including cases in which the procedure was performed on minors as young as 11 years old. The American eugenics movement set the foundations for the use of sterilization as a form of birth control, or a method to control populations of poor and minority women. This practice was widely seen in America throughout the early and middle decades of the 20th century. The compounding...

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