I follow the lines of cartographic systemic racism, and I extend it to how abuse, poverty and violence is often silently exerted when it comes to the issues of reproductive health in Black, Indigenous, and Mexican communities in the United States. The often times silent and silenced exploitation that happened and continues to happen on women of color's bodies are connected with the lack of bodily autonomy that is enforced and carried out through institutionalized abuse and discrimination.
This zine focuses on some of the narratives of people who have been sterilized, especially women and women of color who have been sterilized in the US. I focus on Indigenous women, Native American women and Mexican women. I look at two documentaries that highlight the population control strategy targeted at women of color. These documentaries are No Más Bebés (2015) and Amá (2022). In this project I have included images I found through The Freedom Archives, The American Indian Digital History Archive. In these archives we see collections that women have either drawn, written, and some published pamphlets that were distributed in the Tribal communities.
These archives, they're very much in this space where it's not seen or known as much or talked about. So, I intend to kind of take it out of that forgotten archival space where only people who are interested in this topic know about. I'm trying to take it more into the public space so we can continue that memory work where we can respect those archives yet focus on the narratives and voices to bring into the public's memory.
My theoretical framework is more of a decolonial reproductive justice. And what I mean by a decolonial is centering the narratives, the women who have historically been colonized, been oppressed. These voices have been silenced. And so that's why I say decolonial. And the reason I say reproductive justice is because reproductive health turned into a social justice issue with the Sister Song Collective and so that's their phrasing the issue of accessing healthcare as a collective or as a social justice issue because the lack of accessing quality health care is only a problem for certain groups of people, people of color. And this is why it is a justice issue because it should be equal to everyone who is seeking care.
Dear reader, with this project, I aim to display that a decolonial reproductive justice framework must consider both historical and contemporary contexts of violence, focusing on how gender, colonialism, and reproduction intersect across Indigenous communities globally. This zine will offer a broader, more inclusive understanding of reproductive justice that resists the colonial state's attempts to control bodies and reproductive futures, particularly those of Indigenous peoples.
The two films that are cultural narratives, deal with histories of forced sterilization and the overarching issue of the lack of bodily autonomy of women and the lack of reproductive healthcare provided to women of color in the United States both groups including Indigenous American and immigrant Mexican women.
Women who were coerced into sterilization under the guise of voluntary contraceptive surgery or other surgeries signed consent forms they did not want or did not understand due to lack of clarification from the health care institutions. Exemplified in No Más Bebés, found in page 12 of the zine, tells about Mexican migrant working class women were coerced and forced into sterilization and their bodies, as sites of control, faced abuse and threat from the state and their intimate partners. They faced language barriers because of resources that were not provided to them, and they were denied their bodily autonomy because of eugenics and biopower ideologies. I choose to use the term biopower as defined by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, to address how power is exerted under common laws by governments that exert power over life through regulations such as the regulations around birth control, conception, and sterilization. The women that are marginalized, are the ones whose bodies have been exploited by officials who believed they were not worthy of providing quality care for life. As highlighted in the documentary, a Mexican woman first gets asked if they already have children, and if they did, the doctor (under state laws) decides for them that they have enough children and that they should not need anymore, therefore forcing them into sterilization. Unknowingly, women signed documents out of trust while seeking care in the most vulnerable position only to be exploited and lied to.
The documentary Amá, page 14, shows how women's stories were silenced as women found out through conversations in their community much later that they were collectively victims of the state. The lack of bodily autonomy is horrific in this documentary since women are forced to relocate, forced into sterilization, and forced to go to boarding schools. This documentary touches on the deep trauma of Native American women and the way U.S. government systematically tried to reduce their population. Perhaps the most evident attempt to optimize as referred to by eugenicists and Foucault in biopower, can be seen both through land optimization and population optimization found in page 10. It is stated a few times in the documentary that family planning institutions have abused Indian tribes as a way to reduce poverty in the U.S. and to assimilate them by exerting power over them.
The power of feminist ethics of care is crucial to understand the importance of moral justifications and the lack thereof in state institutions. By relying on a non-traditional approach of history, a public memory work, I bring these documentaries under the light to show how the war against poverty as presented by the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s is not a war on poverty but a war on the people it chooses to neglect. This shifts from an economic question to an ethical one, with the system carefully woven with the intention not to protect life universally, but to prioritize the health of individuals deemed "worthy"—resulting in the neglect, loss of autonomy, and exclusion of marginalized communities.
The first state in the U.S. to pass eugenics based compulsory sterilization was Indiana in 1907. Although this law was overturned in 1927 the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 allowed for compulsory sterilization of patients in mental institutions and this act was not repealed until 1974. The eugenics movement targeted the poor, the disabled, mentally ill, and communities of color, and women who were African American, Asian American, Mexican American or Native American.
In the image below we see the map color coded for U.S. states that passed Eugenics sterilization legislation in the early 20th century.
The cover image provided of the Population Bomb (1968) was a book published to warn people of the problems that overpopulation would cause, such as mass starvation, societal upheaval, and environmental destruction and stemmed to eliminate poverty. This title seeks to evoke fear mongering to target impoverished people. Following this warning, the actions that the U.S. government took was almost a movement and attack on marginalized communities and their reproduction. U.S. policies ranged from policies governing marriage, conception control and birth control, tax income, divorce and remarriage and more. Of all these policies that went out in the 1960s the solution is presented as targeting poverty through population control, but the solution lies within larger systemic imbalances such as food availability, employment, quality health care, day care and education.
Physicians at IHS (Indian Health Services) recommended sterilization to Native American woman as a form of birth control without explaining to them that the results were irreversible and exerted power over women if they tried to refuse by threatening women with losing their children or losing their federal benefits. This image is from an excerpt of a health pamphlet from 1975 that shares the statistics of sterilized women of color.
This quilt displays the untold abuse committed against Native American women by the United States Government during the 1960s and 1970s. During these years women were removed from their families and sent to boarding schools, they were forced relocation and were involuntarily sterilized.
Example of mistreatment at the hands of white medical establishments.
This image is part of a bilingual monograph that represents the language barriers that played a big role in coerced sterilization of Spanish speaking women. This monograph was distributed to inform women of the consequences of sterilization since most women were misinformed and thought their fallopian tubes could be tied and did not realize the sterilization was irreversible.
Efforts to control vulnerable groups, whether via racism, colonialism, or ableism, are frequently linked to forced sterilization. This framework helps analyze how affected individuals and communities respond to the trauma of sterilization policies and practices. Whether through assimilation, integration, or resistance, their responses are shaped by systemic power imbalances and the cultural, historical, and political forces that uphold such injustices. In this image presented to us in the American Indian Digital Archive we see the cautionary image warning Indian Tribes of the misinformation about sterilization given by doctors in U.S. health care units.
This is a family planning pamphlet that was distributed to show Native American families that wealth was associated with the higher number of horses you own and the lesser number of children you have. Used for population control.
During the 1950s and 1960s, women of color as a group, faced the most abuse on sterilization laws and mistreatment at the hands of white medical establishments. There were initiatives of federal funding for birth control and family planning initiatives part of state welfare programs. These programs all advocated the use of birth control pills and supported sterilization to control the reproduction of "unfit" women, women who had disabilities, mental illnesses, who were poor or were nonwhite as women of color were often times labeled as immoral and unclean.
No Más Bebés (2015) meaning no more babies, is a documentary based on the stories of Mexican immigrant mothers who were coerced and forced into sterilization in the U.S.
Mexican migrant working class women were coerced and forced into sterilization under the guise of voluntary contraceptive surgery and they signed consent forms they did not want or did not understand due to lack of clarification from the health care institutions. Thus their bodies, were sites of control that faced abuse and threat from the state and their intimate partners.
Dr. Bernard Rosenfield, and lawyer Antonia Hernandez start a lawsuit against the U.S. government in May 1978. As the documentary presents stories of ten women who agreed to share their horrific experience of going into the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center for labor, they were mistreated and coerced into sterilization without consent.
Amá is a documentary directed by Lorna Tucker, that tells about the untold abuse committed against Native American women by the United States Government during the 1960s and 1970s. The documentary includes narratives from women who tell their stories, one who is Charon Aseytoyer, CEO and founder of native American community and women health education resource center in a reservation in South Dakota.
This poem is written by someone who has learned through their community that their neighbor along with many others had been sterilized and that they are not surprised, as this has happened before and continues to happen to women in their community—displaying the targeting strategy of population control and state violence on women's bodies.
This question was asked by Lawyer Hernandez through her research in the hospital in California of the Mexican women who were documented "sterilized". She visits these women and with their consent, records their traumatic experience to testify for their rights in the lawsuit.
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Sezin Zorlu is a third year PhD student in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Washington State University. She is from Izmir, Turkey. Her research focuses on ecocriticism, environmental justice, blue humanities, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, reproductive justice and contemporary American Literature. Sezin obtained her BA in American Culture and Literature from DEU and her MA in American Culture and Literature from Ege University in Turkey. Before coming to WSU, she worked as a part-time ESL teacher and free-lance translator. Sezin is the recipient of the Fulbright Student Program Award 2022. She is currently teaching an English Composition course and an Introduction to Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies course at WSU.