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- Author, Leire Ventas
- Rolle, correspondent for BBC News Mundo in Los Angeles (USA)
9 hours ago
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Moonlight Pulido was compensated after a sterilization
Something crucial was about to happen, a profound change that would make her deny even her own name, but she didn’t know it yet.
At the time, her name was DeAnna Henderson, and she was in prison, serving a life sentence for attempted murder.
In a routine medical consultation, after the Pap smear was performed, the doctor informed her that he had discovered “two nodules with the potential to develop cancer” and asked if she wanted to remove them.
“Of course I told him. It felt like a matter of life and death,” California native Moonlight Pulido, the name she adopted, told BBC News Mundo, the BBC’s Spanishlanguage service.
“I was surprised he didn’t talk about a biopsy, but I also didn’t have the money to pay a doctor to give me a second opinion,” she admits. So, without question, she signed the consent and went through the process.
Days later, concerned about the discomfort and constant sweating, a nurse saw her doctor’s report and found out what that surgery really entailed: “They performed a complete hysterectomy.”
Your uterus, cervix and other parts of your reproductive system have been removed. In other words, they sterilized them.
“My soul fell to the ground. I was shocked.”
This happened in 2005 at Corona Women’s Prison, part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). And cases like Pulido’s have been repeated in at least three other centers in the state correctional system over the course of the decade.
It’s the latest episode in California’s dark history of forced sterilizations, a past the state is now trying to rectify by offering compensation to victims.
To “improve” the population.
“The history of sterilizations against one’s will or without proper consent in California is extensive and has been recorded at various stages,” Lorena García Zermeño told the BBC.
She is the policy and communications coordinator for California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, one of the groups that has fought for years to get the state to recognize the practice and run a redress program.
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Of the 60,000 sterilizations performed nationwide in the US under eugenics laws, 20,000 took place in California.
The first of these phases is the historical one, relating to the eugenics law that was in effect in California between 1909 and 1979 and whose application peaked in the 1930s.
And eugenics, understood as the supposed “improvement” of the genetic characteristics of a population through targeted reproduction and sterilization, was practiced in the USA even before Nazi Germany.
“In the 20th century, of the 48 states in the US—since Hawaii and Alaska weren’t—32 had eugenics laws that gave medical authorities the power to sterilize those they deemed ‘mentally retarded’ (mentally retarded) or with an intellectual and people who have been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders,” explains Alex Stern.
Stern, director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Laboratory at the University of Michigan, has delved deep into this dark chapter of American history.
“These people, who were placed in government facilities by their loved ones or according to a police report, were subjected to tests to calculate their mental age, their IQ, given a score and based on that the authorities decided whether they were ‘fit’ or not they were capable of reproduction,” he continues.
After a thorough review of state records and data, Stern’s team estimated that of the 60,000 sterilizations performed statewide under eugenics laws, 20,000 occurred in California. One in three.
“It was the most aggressive state and that had to do with the fact that the elites were mostly WASPs (acronym used to define White, AngloSaxon and Protestant in English) and with a lot of power in the legislature and universities , they had a very specific idea of how they wanted the state to be,” says Stern.
Using statistical techniques, her team discovered a pattern: the practice “disproportionately” affected Latinos, particularly young Latinas.
“A Latina who was in a facility in Sonoma or Napa (counties) was 59% more likely to have been spayed than a white woman,” she says.
“And it is that in a period of great immigration, the elites wanted to control the reproduction of Latin American families, the most fertile, and manage the biological future of the state,” while promoting procreation programs for the white middle class.
Spayed at 13
One of those who suffered from this procedure at the height of the Eugenics Act was Mary Franco.
The Californian of Mexican parents was spayed in 1934 at the age of just 13.
She was admitted to a state facility called Pacific Colony in what was then Spadra, now the city of Pomona, about 35 kilometers east of Los Angeles.
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Stacy Cordova with photo of her great aunt Mary Franco
“A neighbor abused her so her family decided to put her in an institution to not make things worse and to protect her reputation because nobody was arrested for that kind of thing back then,” her greatniece, Stacy, tells Cordova BBC News Mundo.
After having her IQ measured at the center and putting her through a series of tests, she was classified as “mentally impaired by sexual deviance” and sterilized, Cordova explains, reading directly from the original medical report.
“It took a toll on her. Throughout her life she regretted not having children and clearly suffered from depression, although it was never diagnosed,” she says.
The story was told to her by her own greataunt in 1997, a year before her death. Mary Franco died unaware that her case was not an isolated one.
“It breaks my heart to think that she always believed what happened to her because she was a bad girl.”
Cordova herself was unaware of the extent of the matter until one day in 2017, while driving, she told Dr. Stern speaks on the radio. “I had to get off the highway and park. I’ve never heard of that ugly strong Californian episode.”
She contacted the researcher and soon the Sterilization and Social Justice Laboratory sent her her great aunt’s medical history and the documents authorizing her sterilization.
“Looking through the papers now, I realize that the issue touches me on many levels: as a Mexican, because it happened in my family and divided them, and because I’m a special education teacher and if this happened today, my students would.” be sterilized,” says Cordova.
‘Population Explosion’
Decades after Franco’s sterilization, when eugenics was already an ideology intrinsic to the Holocaust and heavily criticized by sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars, California still had not rid itself of these practices.
Indeed, between 1968 and 1974, just prior to the repeal of the Eugenics Act, a number of women were subjected, unknowingly or under duress, to procedures that prevented them from having children again.
It took place at the Los AngelesUSC Medical Center, a countyrun hospital.
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Forced or without proper consent sterilizations occurred at the Los AngelesUSC Medical Center in the 1970s.
“At the time, overpopulation was a very big problem,” says Virginia Espino, a historian specializing in population control politics and reproductive injustice who has studied the case in depth.
By 1968, a book called The Population Bomb, which contained phrases like “The battle to feed all mankind is lost” or “Millions of people will starve,” became a bestseller.
In 1969, after warning Congress that there would be 100 million more Americans by the year 2000, President Richard Nixon ordered a commission formed to study the “problem.”
And many public hospitals received hundreds of thousands of federal dollars for family planning programs that included sterilizations.
But things spiraled out of control in some states, where old racial and elitist prejudices were reinforced by new concerns about overpopulation and poverty, eventually affecting poor women, especially black ones.
In the case of Los Angeles, there was also the language barrier and an overcrowded maternity home.
“What I found from my research is that many patients who came to term and did not have a natural birth were coerced, cornered, or tricked into giving up their fertility when they were given informed consent for a Csection.” says Espino.
“And to some they didn’t even explain what they accept.”
“If you don’t sign, you die”
Such was the case of Melvina Hernández, who arrived at the Los AngelesUSC Medical Center at the age of 23 without speaking a word of English.
They said she needed an emergency csection but she had to sign some paperwork first.
She replied in Spanish, no, she couldn’t because her husband wasn’t there.
“If you don’t sign, you will die,” said the nurse, holding up an English document.
“Then she took my hand and made me sign it,” Hernández says in the 2015 documentary No More Babies, coproduced by Espino and directed by Renee TajimaPeña.
The child was born healthy. Hernández didn’t discover until four years later that her fallopian tubes, which connect the uterus and ovaries, had been tied off.
In 1975, she and nine other women filed a classaction lawsuit against the hospital, arguing that they had been denied their constitutional right to have children.
They did so, represented by young lawyer Antonia Hernández and supported by the already powerful Chicano movement, particularly women activists who were developing their own political identity and feminism.
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President Richard Nixon ordered the establishment of the Commission on Population Growth and America’s Future
Despite demonstrations in front of the hospital and public pressure, they lost the case. The judge could not determine who was responsible.
“I don’t know of anyone who has forced family planning on any particular group … I think every woman deserves the right to choose,” said Edward J. Quiligan, director of the medical center’s maternity unit, in the documentary.
However, to prevent this, certain regulations have been put in place, e.g. B. a ban on obtaining consent during childbirth or under anesthesia and the obligation to also submit consent forms in Spanish.
And in 2018, the Los Angeles County Board of Trustees formally apologized to the victims of these sterilizations.
“They told us it wouldn’t happen because the hospital never caught any irregularities. But it happened and it was very important,” says Espino.
the repair
Though the Eugenics Act was repealed decades ago, a state audit found that 144 women incarcerated in four California prisons were sterilized between 2006 and 2010 with little or no evidence of counseling or alternative treatments.
And a later study identified another 100 victims in the late 1990s.
Again, those affected were predominantly Latinas and black Americans.
As a result, the state legislature passed legislation in 2014 banning prison sterilizations for preventive purposes.
This gave impetus to the struggle of a number of organizations that have been demanding justice in this matter for some time.
On January 1, 2022, a $4.5 million compensation program for those affected went into effect, the third in the country after North Carolina (2013) and Virginia (2015).
“California is eager to confront this dark chapter in its past and to address the impact this shameful history continues to have on Californians today,” Gov. Gavin Newson said when he signed the program.
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Chicano activists supported the lawsuit against Los AngelesUSC Medical Center
“Although we can never fully make up for the suffering they have endured, the state will do everything it can to ensure that the survivors of these unjustified sterilizations receive compensation.”
The initiative, administered by the California Board of Victims’ Compensation, includes survivors from the historical era and those sterilized in the state prison system.
However, women who lost their fertility at Los AngelesUSC Medical Center in the 1970s are not included.
The fact that they went to the communityrun hospital of their own free will complicates these cases, sources consulted for this report agree.
However, the sources also agree that these women need to be compensated, but do point out that the current program is a good place to start on the issue.
The search for survivors
When the compensation law was passed in the summer of 2021, the organizations estimated that there were 455 survivors of eugenic sterilizations and 244 among those who had undergone them in prison.
“But given what has happened in other states with similar systems, where only 25% of those affected applied for compensation, we predicted that only about 157 people would receive the money,” says García Zermeño of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice.
So they made an emergency call to locate those affected who were still alive. “Every year that goes by, we lose 100 of the first group because of age.”
After a year of searching, as of January 2023, out of 310 applications, the state had approved 51, denied 103, discarded 3 as incomplete, and had an additional 153 pending.
“We try to find as much information as we can, and sometimes we just have to wait for others to find more details themselves,” said Lynda Gledhill, executive director of the California Board of Victims Compensation.
“Sometimes we just can’t verify what happened.”
“So much money… but so little.”
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In 2014, sterilizations in prisons for contraceptive purposes were banned
Among those who have already received compensation is Pulido.
After being released on parole in January 2022, she contacted the California Coalition for Female Prisoners, demanding her compensation.
Once approved, it took five weeks for him to receive the US$15,000 (approximately R$77,000).
“When the check came, all I could do was sit and hold it and cry,” she recalls, her voice cracking.
“I stayed like that for a long time, watching the number. I never had that much money, but it was so little for what they did to me…”.
And it was years before she was able to talk to anyone about the subject. The experience left a deep impression on her.
“I’m a Native American woman from the Apache people of New Mexico and we believe that Mother Earth gave women the ability to create life. And that gift was stolen from me without my permission and without my knowledge,” she says. still angry. .
Now 41 and with a son, she says she has been deprived of the opportunity to start a new family.
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“When the (compensation) check came, all I could do was sit and hold it and cry,” says Moonlight
“To this day, when I’m walking down the street or walking into stores and I see mothers with their children, I stop and look at them. I will never bring her back to life. It’s something that touches me emotionally every day.”
Nevertheless, she has enjoyed her freedom and looks to the future with renewed strength and has a new name.
“DeAnna (her former name) had a difficult childhood, a lot of trauma from what she saw, felt and how she was treated. She felt like she was carrying a very large backpack,” he explains.
She chose her current name because she wanted it to be something that would be considered Native American. Always influenced by the moon, she “desired to belong to the light part of life” and took her mother’s maiden name.
Moonlight Pulido now has plans that could include leaving California and living in the US state of Illinois with her son.
And it also has a mission: “I want to say to all those who have been through the same thing as me to speak up, demand compensation and if you refuse, try again. Don’t give up.”
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