IsisCB Explore

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
Language: English

Publication Date: 2007
Physical Details: 324 pp.

Outside Links

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.

...More

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.

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001560963

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Javier Castro Arcos; (2017)
Guerra en el vientre: control de natalidad, malthusianismo y guerra fría en Chile, 1960-1970 (/p/isis/citation/CBB450385078/)

Article Kim, Sonja; (2008)
“Limiting Birth”: Birth Control in Colonial Korea (1910--1945) (/p/isis/citation/CBB000930700/)

Book Dowbiggin, Ian Robert; (2008)
The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB000930596/)

Book Kluchin, Rebecca M.; (2009)
Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950--1980 (/p/isis/citation/CBB000933019/)

Book Wheatley, Thelma; (2013)
“And Neither Have I Wings to Fly”: Labelled and Locked up in Canada's Oldest Institution (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420282/)

Article Vallejo, Gustavo; (2007)
Males y remedios de la ciudad moderna: perspectivas ambientales de la eugenesia argentina de entreguerras (/p/isis/citation/CBB000831508/)

Chapter Valone, David A.; (2007)
Foundations, Eugenic Sterilization, and the Emergence of the World Population Control Movement (/p/isis/citation/CBB000774628/)

Thesis Sujin Lee; (2017)
Problematizing Population: Politics of Birth Control and Eugenics in Interwar Japan (/p/isis/citation/CBB518032041/)

Article Segrest, Mab; (2014)
Exalted on the Ward: “Mary Roberts,” the Georgia State Sanitarium, and the Psychiatric “Speciality” of Race (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201824/)

Book Wray, Matt; (2006)
Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (/p/isis/citation/CBB001021028/)

Book Molly Ladd-Taylor; (2017)
Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB934034393/)

Thesis Norman, Kathleen Lynne; (2000)
“Biological living”: The redemption of women and America through healthy living, dress and eugenics (/p/isis/citation/CBB001560835/)

Article Wolf, Arthur P.; (2008)
Fertility and Fertility Control in Pre-Revolutionary China (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030421/)

Article Cassia Roth; (2020)
The Degenerating Sex: Female Sterilisation, Medical Authority and Racial Purity in Catholic Brazil (/p/isis/citation/CBB353485138/)

Article Doetz, Susanne; (2012)
Widerspruch und Eigen-Sinn zwangssterilisierter Frauen (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421898/)

Chapter Richards, Robert J.; (2009)
That Darwin and Haeckel Were Complicit in Nazi Biology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001032214/)

Chapter Kravetz, Melissa; (2011)
Promoting Eugenics and Maternalism: Women Doctors and Marriage Counseling in Weimar Germany (/p/isis/citation/CBB001221549/)

Book Rubenfeld, Sheldon; (2010)
Medicine after the Holocaust: From The Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond (/p/isis/citation/CBB001031272/)

Article Marazia, Chantal; (2011)
Philosophical Whitewashing. Ludwig Binswanger (1881--1966) and the Sterilisation of Manic-Depressive Patients (/p/isis/citation/CBB001220600/)

Article Eraso, Yolanda; (2007)
Biotypology, Endocrinology, and Sterilization: The Practice of Eugenics in the Treatment of Argentinian Women during the 1930s (/p/isis/citation/CBB000830252/)