Permanent Solution: Contraceptive sterilization policies and practices in the U.S. from 1960-1979
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This study examines the social and political anxieties regarding poverty and reproduction during the 1960s and 1970s that led to the sterilization of young, African-American women from low-income families. It begins by analyzing the roles of the population control and burgeoning feminist movements that with the support of physicians, successfully lobbied for liberalized contraceptive sterilization policies and laws. At the same time that lawmakers felt pressure to broaden sterilization access, illegitimacy rates steadily increased, which many believed posed an economic threat. Upon examination of public policy regarding family planning, it becomes clear that in the early 1970s federally funded and state-operated clinics intended not only to use sterilization as a method to help reduce poverty through limiting the size of poor women’s families, but also to reduce the number of illegitimate births. After mid-1971 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) both subsidized contraceptive sterilizations for the economically disadvantaged, but failed to establish comprehensive federal guidelines and instead empowered state lawmakers and physicians to determine their own sterilization policies. Subsequently between 1971 and 1973, the rate of sterilization spiked, and was disproportionately high among African-American women. In 1973 when the sterilization of the Relf sisters—two, African-American girls from a low income family—became publicly known, several Federal agencies launched investigations and discovered numerous other cases of young women being coerced into sterilization. Found to be at fault in Relf v. Weinberger, the court ordered the HEW to create sterilizations guidelines, which they released in 1975. In light of ongoing sterilization abuse, just three years later the HEW adopted controversial and more protective guidelines, still in place today. Through analyzing family planning and sterilization policies between 1960 and 1979, this article demonstrates that the reproduction of young, unmarried African-American women was used as political scapegoats to avoid addressing the fundamental sources of poverty. As a result, countless numbers of young, African-American permanently lost their ability to procreate due to circumstances beyond their control.
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M.A.