The Long and Sordid History of Forced Sterilization Programs
The whistleblower nurse in Georgia told a grim story that’s been a part of American history for decades
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Charmaine Fuller Cooper was outraged — but not surprised — when she heard recent allegations that a Georgia detention center performed medically questionable hysterectomies on undocumented immigrants without their consent.
On September 14, advocacy groups filed a complaint that accused the Irwin County Detention Center, which houses immigrants for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), of subjecting some immigrants to unnecessary hysterectomies and denying critical services, such as diabetic care and coronavirus testing.
“I was horrified because, in the back of my mind, I saw all the children in the detention camps (because that’s what I’m calling them on the border),” Cooper says. “And I was concerned because, going back into the history, we have petitions for children as young as five years old to be sterilized in North Carolina.”
Cooper served as executive director for the NC Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation from 2010 until 2012. In that position, she was empowered to research, find, and offer up to $50,000 in compensation to North Carolinians who were forcibly sterilized by the state.
North Carolina had one of the nation’s longest-running state sterilization programs, which spanned from the 1920s to the 1970s. Threatening residents with the loss of welfare benefits or family separation, local health departments and networks of social workers and clinicians rendered 7,600 residents unable to have children because they were considered “defective, “deviant,” or “feebleminded.”
They earned those labels for stigmatized health conditions or behaviors: petty theft of bicycles, cognitive disabilities, mundane school troubles, dressing as a different gender, getting pregnant or staying out late as teen, or simply being born into a poor family at a time when many people believed poverty and criminality were inherited traits. In 2002, North…
