Why We Need to Think Beyond Roe v. Wade - Pacific Standard
For the immigrant mothers—Dolores Madrigal, the lead plaintiff, and the nine others named in the suit, and countless others whose names we will not know—the story was more complex, the culpable more numerous. First, there were the doctors and hospital staff, collecting the mothers’ signatures as they labored, rushing them through paperwork and into surgery. (Their suit began with evidence collected by one of these doctors, a whistleblower.)
The state of California and the U.S. government bore responsibility too, for advancing “population control” programs meant to keep poor women, immigrant women, and women of color from having children. Sterilization laws and practices, like those in California, had roots in eugenics, in notions of “fitness” and racial purity.
It was 1978 when the women lost their suit. But their fight inspired Chicana feminists, who pushed the white-dominated reproductive rights movement to understand forced sterilization as their fight.
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