Reports of forced hysterectomies at Georgia ICE facility stir dark memories for some
Allegations of mass hysterectomies at an ICE detention center in Georgia have drawn parallels to America’s clouded history of forced sterilization targeting Black and Brown communities.
A whistleblower complaint filed Monday alleges the Irwin County Detention Center in southern Georgia failed to protect detainees from the coronavirus and performed an unusually high number of hysterectomies on Spanish-speaking women using a doctor nicknamed “the uterus collector,” media outlets report.
Politicians, advocacy groups and activists on social media were quick to point out those methods of forced sterilization are rooted in U.S. history — starting before World War II.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likened the allegations to “a staggering abuse of human rights” in a statement Tuesday.
“This profoundly disturbing situation recalls some of the darkest moments of our nation’s history, from the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks, to the horror of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, to the forced sterilizations of Black women that Fannie Lou Hamer and so many others underwent and fought,” Pelosi said.
‘An experimental concentration camp’
Monday’s complaint was submitted to the Department of Homeland Security inspector by the Government Accountability Project and Project South on behalf of Dawn Wooten, CNN reported.
Wooten worked full time as a licensed practical nurse at the detention center until she was demoted in July “after missing work with coronavirus symptoms,” CBS News reported. The complaint alleges Wooten was demoted for raising concerns about the facility’s lack of COVID-19 protections.
The 27-page document published online by Project South outlines a slew of additional complaints against the facility, including a lack of quality medical care, inadequate coronavirus testing, shredded medical records, unsafe working conditions and mass hysterectomies.
One immigrant who is not identified reportedly spoke to at least five women detained in late 2019 who had a hysterectomy.
“When I met these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp,” she said in the complaint. “It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.”
The rate of hysterectomies performed was a “red flag” for Wooten, who said “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”
She also said she wasn’t sure the women “really, totally, all the way understand this is what’s going to happen depending on who explains it to them,” pointing to the communication barrier with nurses who don’t speak Spanish and instead rely on Google translate.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement told Vice in a statement that it “does not comment on matters handled by the Office of the Inspector General.”
“ICE takes all allegations seriously and defers to the OIG regarding any potential investigation and/or results,” the agency said, according to Vice. “That said, in general, anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve.”
Historic parallels
State and local governments sanctioned eugenics programs before World War II and well into the Civil Rights Era, according to historical record.
Eugenics is another word for the selective breeding of humans.
Fatima Goss Graves, CEO and president of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a tweet Monday the the Irwin County Detention Center’s alleged practices are not “unprecedented,” pointing to a “long history of Native American sterilizations” and the earliest reparation programs for forced sterilizations in North Carolina.
At least “25% of Native American women of childbearing age” were forcibly sterilized over six years in the 1970s thanks to a law subsidizing sterilizations for recipients of Medicare and the Indian Health Service, TIME reported.
North Carolina’s eugenics program — which forcibly sterilized nearly 7,600 men and women between 1929 and 1974 — was compared to genocide in a recent academic paper correlating 10 years of forced sterilizations in counties across the state with the number of unemployed Black residents, McClatchy News previously reported.
The paper, co-authored by Duke University professor William A. Darity Jr., found the program was all but designed “to breed out nonworking Black residents,” according to a university news release.
Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley called sterilizations “a cruel tool of white supremacy with a long, abominable history in this country,” while Twitter user @redpomgranat pointed out Adolph Hitler’s Nazi race science was based in part on forced sterilization and eugenics programs in the U.S.
A 2015 opinion article published in the Los Angeles Times quotes Hitler’s 1925 book “Mein Kampf” in which he “celebrated the ideology.”
“There is today one state, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable,” Hitler reportedly wrote. “Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”
Advocacy group Bend the Arc: Jewish Action made a similar comparison on Twitter, calling ICE’s alleged actions “genocide” while pointing to the forced sterilizations of Mexican and Mexican-American women in Los Angeles.
Several Mexican and Mexican-American women admitted to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in the late 1960s and early 1970s for emergency caesarians unknowingly agreed to have their “tubes tied,” according to NBC News.
“Many women gave their signature, on what they believed to be standard paperwork, despite feeling bewildered or disoriented, being in severe pain, or not understanding English,” the media outlet reported.
In addition to communities of color, historical record shows eugenics programs in the U.S. also targeted people with disabilities, prisoners and the poor.
New Jersey Congresswoman Watson Coleman called the allegations against the Irwin County Detention Center “barbarism” in a statement Tuesday.
“The U.S. has a long, disturbing history of mistreating prisoners and detainees, but this level of cold-blooded inhumanity is sickening,” she said on Twitter. “Forced sterilization is a crime against humanity.”
This story was originally published September 15, 2020 at 3:52 PM with the headline "Reports of forced hysterectomies at Georgia ICE facility stir dark memories for some."
