Ice hysterectomy allegations in line with US's long and racist history of eugenics

An Ice detention center in Georgia is reportedly the site of a mass involuntary sterilization project. A whistleblower report published by the non-profit Project South alleges that large numbers of migrant women held at the Irwin county detention center, a privately run facility that imprisons undocumented immigrants, received hysterectomies that they did not want and which were not medically necessary. The allegations reported by Project South were first made in a formal complaint by a nurse working at the detention center, Dawn Wooten, who describes the conditions there and conversations she had with imprisoned women in detail. The hysterectomies were all allegedly performed by the same outside gynecologist, Mehendra Amin, of Douglas, Georgia. Wooten says that one migrant woman referred to Amin as the “uterus collector”. Amin told The Intercept that he had only done “one or two hysterectomies in the past two [or] three years.” Responding to the allegations, he said “Everything is wrong” and urged Intercept reporters to “talk to the hospital administrator” for more information.

The women say they were not told why they were having hysterectomies,

with some saying that they were given conflicting reasons for the procedures or reprimanded when asked about them. Wooten’s account in the Project South report was corroborated by two lawyers, who told NBC News that four women in the facility whom they represent, had been sterilized without medical cause and without their consent. According to the Project South report, a detained woman at the Irwin county center said: “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.”

As horrific as the allegations are, it’s not likely that either the Irwin county officials or Dr Amin were experimenting. More likely, they knew exactly what they were doing. If true, the allegations of forced sterilizations would make the Irwin county detention center only the latest in America’s long history of eugenics, which has disproportionately targeted women of color.

In the early 20th century, white American intellectuals were pioneers of race science, advancing the idea that “undesirable” traits could and should be bred out of the population with government planning and selective, involuntary sterilization programs. Everything the Nazis knew about eugenics, they learned from the United States. The 1927 Buck v Bell supreme court case, in which the court ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize a 20-year-old named Carrie Buck against her will, led to an era of enthusiastically racist population engineering by state governments. Federally funded eugenics boards were established in 32 states, through which tax dollars were spent to sterilize approximately 70,000 people, mostly women. These programs were used to enforce via state law the racist fiction of America as a white country, and forced sterilization disproportionately targeted Black women.

A separate federal program in the 1960s and 1970s deputized doctors with the Indian Health Service to choose which Native American women they personally deemed fit to reproduce, and to make those women’s reproductive choices for them accordingly. They decided that approximately a quarter of Native American women were unfit to have children, and sterilized them. As with the migrant women at the Irwin county center, many of the Native women were lied to about the nature of their procedures, or were sterilized without their knowledge during other surgeries. Some Native women were told, incorrectly, that the sterilizations were reversible; others were told that they were being treated for appendicitis, or needed to have their tonsils removed. They discovered the truth when they woke up.

Nor was it only state actors who forced sterilization on women. Some gynecologists took it upon themselves to sterilize women they didn’t think should be having children. In her groundbreaking work on the reproductive oppression of Black women, Killing the BlackBody, the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts details the case of Clovis Pierce, the only Medicaid-accepting obstetrician in Aiken county, South Carolina. Pierce allegedly demanded that his pregnant Medicaid patients consent to sterilization before he agreed to deliver their children. He reportedly threatened women who resisted with legal action; once, when a woman currently in labor objected to being sterilized, Pierce allegedly had her thrown out of the hospital. One of Pierce’s patients, Dorothy Waters, claims that Pierce explained his rationale for enforcing her sterilization in extremely blunt terms. “Listen here, young lady, this is my tax money paying for this baby and I’m tired of paying for illegitimate children,” he told her. “If you don’t want this sterilization, find another doctor.” Dr Pierce reportedly sterilized 18 women at Aiken county hospital in 1972 alone. Sixteen of them were Black.

None of this is distant history. North Carolina’s eugenics program, through which 7,600 people were sterilized, did not end until 1977. Dr Pierce moved his practice from Aiken to Greenville, South Carolina, and was still practicing as recently as 2012.

Few fictions are as violently defended as the one that posits that America is for white people, and few things make those who cherish this fiction so angry as the specter of nonwhite women choosing for themselves when to have children and how many children to have. Forced sterilizations like the ones that happened to women at the Irwin county center and to women throughout the nation during the 20th century are first and foremost human rights violations, cruel abridgements of those women’s dignity, autonomy and rights to self determination. But they are also statements of white supremacist hostility, an assertion by white racists of the thing they most hate and fear: new Americans of color.

in the global south. Withholding access to life-saving medications could accurately be described as a form of genocide. We need to make sure Covid vaccines are not withheld in a similar manner.

When asked who owned the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk famously replied: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

A similar spirit should animate the future of global vaccine development.

No nation or corporation should be holding the rest of us hostage. If we insist on our values of access and equity for everyone, vaccine volunteers can collectively bargain for a better future. We want to see genuine commitments to equity. The US must collaborate in good faith with other countries and embrace the UNAid and Oxfam’s call for a People’s Vaccine, which demands that “all vaccines, treatments and tests be patent-free, mass produced, distributed fairly and made available to all people, in all countries, free of charge”.

Thomas Gokey is a co-founder of Debt Collective

than six months for their businesses to recover. That number is now down to about 20%, which means that more business owners believe the recovery period will be much longer. Also, 28% of small businesses said they had less than a month of cash on hand to operate their companies compared with 41% at the beginning of the crisis. That’s not a good trend.

Almost a quarter of all businesses said they would need more financial assistance or capital, which is only slightly down from the numbers recorded at the beginning of the crisis. And the number of business owners who said they may need to permanently close their business is still hovering around 5%.

The Census Bureau believes that the results from its weekly survey “will be particularly useful to policymakers as they seek to address some of the challenges faced by small businesses”. My concern is that lawmakers will look at this data and conclude that because small businesses are recovering, additional stimulus funding may not be necessary.

That’s wrong.

Last week, a scaled-back bill to provide more stimulus – which included another round of money for the paycheck protection program – failed to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, mainly because it fell short of the funding that many Democrats believe is still necessary.

Both parties are right. More funding is necessary. But maybe not as much for small businesses as originally intended. Many small businesses – particularly in certain industries like restaurants, retail, fitness and travel and in hard-hit regions like New York City – still need help. A stimulus program targeted directly at these and other businesses that continue to suffer under the impact of the pandemic is still needed. Forgiving the existing paycheck protection loans for smaller companies, as well as allowing them to deduct those forgivable expenses, would provide a welcome relief for many.

The good news is that the prospects for most small businesses are improving, finally. More companies than previously thought are surviving. Barring a resurgence of the virus, there appears to be light at the end of the tunnel. But the numbers still aren’t great and for some more help is needed.

itself to special status via claims of unique access to truth,” Phelps-Roper told me via online message.

All the same, she confirmed that she doesn’t use the term because it shuts down communication channels.

“People tend to dismiss cult members as crazy or stupid, rather than complex human beings like everyone else,” she said. “That makes compassion and real understanding more difficult, and it can give us a false sense of security that we’re not subject to the same kinds of forces that draw people into these groups and keep them there.”

Plus, Phelps-Roper explained, she can’t get through to her family by lobbing labels that make them bristle.

“I want to reach Westboro members – to help convince them that there are other, better ways of living in the world,” she said. “If I use a needlessly pejorative word like that to describe people who are earnestly trying to do what they believe is right, I’m throwing obstacles in my own path and making change even more difficult than it naturally is.”

There has been much discussion in recent years about the extent to which liberal America should or should not have empathy for, say, economically distressed Trump voters. Some encourage compassion about the hard lives that made some of them vulnerable to political fearmongering. Others might point out that plenty of Trump voters are doing just fine in the coddled world of whiteness and that, regardless of their reasons, we should practice zero tolerance toward agents of oppression.

The strongest position contains both truths. We can acknowledge that destructive ideas have roots deeper than the individuals who hold them and yet firmly denounce such ideas. To hear Mary Trump tell it in her new memoir, her uncle is severely dysfunctional in part because of his upbringing. But the purpose of her story is not to engender sympathy for our current president, “the world’s most dangerous man”. It is to show how he was made – revealing that the problem is not the current president but, rather, what patriarchy, corporate greed and white supremacy can make out of an innocent child born in the belly of all three.

You can be intellectually woke without being awakened to the largest truth: that we are all connected, enemies and allies alike. The United States is teetering toward authoritarianism. Are you still lecturing strangers on social media? Are you still shouting at a family member that they’re wrong? How is that working out?

If you want to stop fascism, the efficient mission is not to attack the opposing side. It is, rather, to be the opposite of Donald Trump: a defiantly open heart who protects and bolsters valid information systems required for people to truly decide for themselves about all that he and his movement represent.

If you think such information is a given in the world we are living in, you are mistaken.

•••

Many white people believe the current president is a good man. Are they irrational, some perhaps even disturbed? If they have valid news sources, then by my estimation, yes.

But many do not. They live in spaces inundated by decades of rightwing propaganda and intentional manipulation of their fears.

Not everyone targeted by disinformation falls for it, and such experiences are not an excuse for racist, sexist, xenophobic views and political choices. But they are a reason.

In March, 63% of Fox News regulars, polled by the non-partisan Pew Research Center’s Election News Pathways Project said the president’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was “excellent”. Just 23% of average Americans – and a mere 2% of MSNBC regulars – agreed.

MSNBC and Fox News’ treatment of facts is not analogous. The former comments with a liberal slant, while the latter now amounts to state television for a Republican White House. But both sides of the American political divide have allegiances to information sources that affirm their existing beliefs.

Meanwhile, false information masquerading as fact is a common feature of our times.Most misinformation disseminated online during the 2016 election had a pro-Trump slant, and recent research studies have suggested that misinformation is most concentrated among conservative media consumers. However, researchers at the University of Colorado published a report last May indicating that a substantial number of leftists share false or misleading information, too.

Let’s acknowledge that today’s cultural chasm is driven by social media streams and cable “news” programs. It is easy, in such a splintered media ecosystem, to maintain a closed system of unfalsifiable beliefs in which inconvenient facts become “fake news”.

Some of today’s most dangerous misinformation concerns a public health crisis. What accounts for those who, say, insist that the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax and thus refuse to wear a mask?

According to a research report from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the strongest predictors of belief in Covid-19 conspiracy theories are not educational attainment or political affiliation but, along with partisan and ideological motivations, “a psychological predisposition” to dismiss experts and doubt mainstream narratives about major events.

But to what is this predisposition owed? We enter treacherous territory when we diagnose something inherent about a person to explain her partisan leanings. A major research study in 2016 debunked oft-cited studies claiming causality between personality and politics. It is self-aggrandizing for the well-informed, though, to declare that gullibility is innate and that proponents of misinformation are just dumb. Here we find the fatal flaw of self-congratulatory liberalism.

When presented with evidence of, say, lower salaries for women and higher incarceration among people of color, liberals rightly reject the notion that these outcomes result from innately lower aptitude, laziness and corrupt character. We rightly point to the oppressive conditions of a racist, sexist state to explain such data. In other words, we understand that the system failed the person, not the other way around. Yet we place ideological identities in no such environmental context.

What if our systems failed the media consumers who are, for myriad reasons, easily taken by political lies? Underfunded public schools could be teaching media literacy and civics but are forced to prioritize testing-driven curricula while providing basic needs such as food and healthcare. Underregulated, profit-driven social media companies have focused on mining user data rather than stopping malicious spread of false information on their platforms. Understaffed publications of the free press have, amid efforts to adapt to the digital media economy, turned news into salacious, conflict-driven clickbait to maintain the bottom line.

We must approach the current political crisis less like a valid debate and more like the treatment of a toxic stream along which extremist factions swirl into themselves like eddies. You and the person you’re arguing with don’t even share a common set of definitions, let alone discussion frameworks or worldviews. No movement can win in the 21st century without this understanding as a foundation.

To clear that toxic stream, we need robustly funded schools with civics curricula that activate participation in democracy, tell the story of all peoples, admit our often brutal history as a nation, and incorporate 21st-century media literacy as an essential tool of citizenship. We need government crackdowns on big tech’s complicity in the spread of misinformation. We need new, less compromised business models encouraging media members to be government watchdogs rather than generators of advertising revenue.

But information is only part of the solution for what ails our country. Political scientists have long noted the role of emotion in political behavior, and logic will not sway positions that were not formed through logic. Many Trump voters were moved not by facts but by the feelings their outrageous leader incites. As conservative analyst Bill Kristol recently tweeted, reacting to news that the Republican National Committee will merely endorse “the President’s America-first agenda” in lieu of any new platform, “It’s no longer the Republican party. It’s a Trump cult.”

Here we can learn from those like Phelps-Roper, who have freed themselves from irrational worldviews. Reaching past someone’s biased influences, as her story of unlikely Twitter friendships reveals, requires not just better information but a non-confrontational, even respectful tone in conveying it.Members of oppressed groups should not be expected to do this work, of course, which is at best emotional labor and at worst physically dangerous. But what about would-be cultural bridge-builders protected by privileges such as whiteness and wealth? Should they bother?

Yes. Nationally, voters are breaking ranks from “Trumpism”, disavowing their lifelong party or finding belonging with “never Trump” Republican groups like the Lincoln Project.

My state government contains several elected officials who left the Republican Party and became Democrats in recent years—including a viable 2020 candidate for a U.S. Senate seat held by Republicans since 1919.

From 2014 to 2018, during which the Black Lives Matter movement successfully forced a national reckoning about race, the portion of white Republicans who said government spends too little on improving conditions for Black Americans more than doubled, rising from 14 to 33%, according to a report from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

We should value justice over unity. But there is more unity to be had than you might think from watching the news. People change, and privileged Americans who can help them do so play an important role in this pivotal moment.

•••

As Phelps-Roper says in her muchviewed Ted Talk, the Twitter friends who helped her see the light “didn’t abandon their beliefs or their principles – only their scorn. They channeled their infinitely justifiable offense and came to me with pointed questions tempered with kindness and humor. They approached me as a human being – and that was more transformative than two full decades of outrage, disdain and violence.”

If someone who dislikes this notion has changed someone’s mind through contempt and condescension, I’d love to hear about it. The opposite is more likely to be true, in my experience. The confronted person digs in, defends, doubles down.

In a July opinion piece for the New York Times, Charlie Warzel described a Senegalese medical anthropologist sent by the World Health Organization to Guinea, where residents were resisting public health guidance during the Ebola epidemic in 2014. He spent a long time listening, rather than lecturing, and realized that the people “weren’t selfish or anti-science. They were scared and felt stripped of dignity by officials who didn’t respect them or understand their traditions.”

While US “anti-maskers” of the Covid-19 pandemic are a different bunch, understanding their motives is necessary to successfully reach them.

“You cannot force public trust,” Warzel wrote of the current health crisis. “You have to earn it by being humble and transparent, and by listening.”

Is such humility warranted in the face of terrible actors, those who not only refuse to wear a mask but refuse to accept the value of entire groups of human beings?

If an equitable, non-violent society is our goal, ideologies that seek to dismantle unjust power structures such as white supremacy and patriarchy are unequivocally better than those that do not. There is no moral equivalence between the neo-Nazi and the Black Lives Matter protester, or the feminist marcher and the men’s rights activist. Some ideas are superior to others.

But even if your ideas are superior, I am asking you to consider that you did not arrive at them because of your innate superiority. Depending on your level of social and racial privilege, you arrived at them because of your life experiences, your information sources, your community influences. Even a psychological predisposition toward rational thinking, if this a valid possibility, is just a bit of good fortune you did nothing to earn.

If you had been born into the Phelps family, would you have thought your way out of Westboro? At what age? Twelve? Eighteen, when you left home? Twenty-six, by way of social media? Forty-four, better late than never? How about never? For many the answer thus far is never.

That’s an extreme example, I hear you say. Children of cults are one thing, but a Trump voter has free will in their decisions.True. Yet if you’d been born white, in a homogeneously white place, with Fox News on every television and Rush Limbaugh on every car radio for your entire life, would you be a liberal or even a centrist today? Maybe, but not without knowing the hard truth that people who think monstrous things often are not, at their core, monsters.Nope, I hear you say. I am better than a Trump voter. I’m sure as hell better than a Nazi.

On the level of ideas, well, yes. But why? Is it because something about them is naturally defective? You yourself would have been one of the good ones in Germany, correct? Because something about you is inherently better?

If that all sounds right, be careful. The seed of everything you’re fighting is inside you.

Sarah Smarsh’s new book, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, will be published in October 2020. She lives in Kansas