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Thesis ID: CBB001560963

Women Sterilized as They Give Birth: Population Control, Eugenics, and Social Protest in the Twentieth-Century United States (2007)

Arizona State University

Publication Date: 2007
Physical Details: 324 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Medical abuse Public health Women Medicine and race Birth control; contraception; sterilization Eugenics Population Science and ethics 20th century, late United States Los Angeles (California)

In the mid-1970s Chicano lawyers filed two landmark lawsuits against the Los Angeles County Hospital-USC Medical Center: Andrade v. Los Angeles County in 1974, and Madrigal v. Quilligan in 1975. Both suits accused certain hospital doctors of coercing women into unwanted sterilization surgeries. However, rather than focus on the lawsuits this study looks at the ten Mexican women who became the plaintiffs in Madrigal v. Quilligan , the intellectual origins of the policies that sought to have the women sterilized, and the movement that arose in Los Angeles resisting the abuse. Although forced sterilizations in the United States date back to the late nineteenth century, the sterilizations explored in this dissertation occurred at a time when the U.S. experienced an eruption of social movements on a wide variety of issues. Unlike previous cases of abuse, 1970s victims and their supporters engaged in public protests, organizational meetings, press conferences, and public court battles in the hopes of winning redress for the victims and a change in federal law that would ensure protection for women against future abuses. This dissertation explores new dimensions in the history of eugenic sterilizations in the United States. It challenges the contention that the 1950s and 1960s experienced a decline of eugenic beliefs. Where previous studies focus primarily on those victims considered criminal, mentally ill or 'sexually deviant,' this study illustrates that sterilizations occurred in apparently legal and voluntary procedures, where hospital staff obtained consent through coercion or without the patient's knowledge. The evidence demonstrates that the doctors at the Los Angeles County Hospital sought to lower the birth rate of women of Mexican heritage.

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Description Challenges the contention that there was a decline in eugenic sterilizations in the 1950s and 1960s. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/11 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3287938.

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