As details emerge, Molina and other scholars say they see this week's allegations as the latest chapter in a long and troubling history. “If you fight with us at your door and refuse to collaborate with us, you will go to the police station and sit on the metal chair!”. whistleblower's allegations about hysterectomies in ICE custody, has written about the history of forced sterilization, California's history has been particularly troubling, in the California prison system there were also issues of forced sterilization, Sterilizations in the 1970s at the county hospital, said to her the connections between that case and this week's allegations are clear, Hamer underwent a hysterectomy without her consent in 1961. Their victims were poor, disproportionately women, and often women of color. Queer people have always had a particular relationship with history. Patterns varied from state to state, Stern says. Her story, first told to the Dutch Uyghur Human Rights Foundation, is difficult to verify. ", Sterilizations in the 1970s at the county hospital in Los Angeles spurred protests and a lawsuit that later became the subject of a documentary, "No Más Bebés.". "We know that there were forced sterilizations at LA County hospital. The Nazis, who sterilized hundreds of thousands before moving onto outright mass murder, used American eugenicist theory, such as it was, and practice as an excuse for their own. Klara Nowak, a German nurse and activist who led the League of Victims of Compulsory Sterlisation and Euthanasia after the war, had herself been forcibly sterilized in 1941. Jennifer Rosenberg is a historian and writer who specializes in 20th-century history. Just over two years later, at 50, she was forced to undergo sterilisation. In the second centre where she worked, which held mostly young women, a trusted colleague told her that rape of inmates by Han Chinese administrators was routine. Most of the prisoners were in their 20s and 30s, she said. At six months of age, Vivian Buck was looked at by a social worker and deemed to be just like her mother. I wonder why they keep silent.”. Famed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer spoke out about her sterilization, Stern says, drawing attention to the practice. The fallopian tubes are blocked or sealed to prevent the eggs reaching the sperm and becoming fertilised. "Under those laws, about 60,000 people were sterilized in procedures that we would qualify today as being compulsory, forced, involuntary, and under the justifications that the people who were being sterilized were unfit to reproduce," she says. Zwangssterilisation und „Euthanasie“ , Frankfurt/M. But just because something happened historically, he says, doesn't mean it's happening now. There have been reports of Han “relatives” in Uighur homes forcing female hosts to share beds, and sexually assaulting them, particularly when men were in camps. The Germans were not the creators of nor the first to implement governmentally-sanctioned forced sterilization. These petitions were reviewed and decided by a three-member panel in the Hereditary Health Courts. Forced sterilization removes a person’s ability to reproduce, usually permanently and irreversibly. Some of these people soon after their sterilization became victims of the Nazi euthanasia program. Well+Good decodes and demystifies what it means to live a well life, inside and out. “I saidmy body cannot take it, but they told me ‘you don’t want children, so you have no excuse not to have the sterilisation operation.’”. 1849 ... We know that in the California prison system there were also issues of forced sterilization," she says. The rapist had been a relative of Carrie’s foster parents; this may have been another reason they wanted her out of the way. People need to also realize that that’s what [detention centers] are; they’re jails.”. Why are we still dissecting the crime? Help us keep publishing stories that provide scholarly context to the news. "Much like today's case...the women often had little to no grasp of English, leaving them vulnerable to coercion.". She knew what happened to people from Muslim minorities who resisted the government, and a Uighur-language text message that she shared with the Guardian, which she said came from local authorities, made the threat explicit. But he has since divorced her, and with that link severed Sidik decided to come forward under her name. "Many of us have been thinking about this history recently as we start thinking about who's going to get the (Covid-19) vaccine," she says, "and are communities of color going to be trusting the government?". Another New Low for Trump's ICE. "Without evidence I really hesitate to say, 'Yeah, they're probably doing sterilizations just the way they used to do in the 1920s.'