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Eugenic States: A Contextual Archive Main Menu Introduction Critical Themes in the History of Eugenics Eugenic Practices in California, Iowa, and North Carolina What We Can Say with Data Acknowledgements

Forced Sterilizations Image

3 A image from a newspaper clipping from the San Francisco Examiner about coercive sterilization in California, dated March 19, 1935. Photograph under heading depicts two children on tricycles. The caption reads: “Mother Tells Story — Here are Kathleen and John, only children of Mrs. Theresa Sweeney of Contra Costa County. Mrs. Sweeney yesterday declared relief director tried to force her to submit to a sterilization operation. When she went to the county hospital for a minor operation, Mrs. Sweeney said, she believes the sterilization took place.” — Examiner Staff Photo

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Forced Sterilizations John Bell
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1. Forced Sterilizations Image A image from a newspaper clipping from the San Francisco Examiner about coercive sterilization in California, dated March 19, 1935. Photograph under heading depicts two children on tricycles. The caption reads: “Mother Tells Story — Here are Kathleen and John, only children of Mrs. Theresa Sweeney of Contra Costa County. Mrs. Sweeney yesterday declared relief director tried to force her to submit to a sterilization operation. When she went to the county hospital for a minor operation, Mrs. Sweeney said, she believes the sterilization took place.” — Examiner Staff Photo

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Coercive Consent The process medical institutions followed to obtain consent for sterilization was, while well documented in many cases, fraught with coercive and manipulative measures and intense pressure to agree to the operation. Scandals in multiple states exposed that institutions sterilized patients in hospitals and youth in reformatory schools through deception, or plainly overruled a family’s wishes. A 1934 probe in Michigan emerged from charges that patients at the Wayne County Home for Mental Defectives and Lapeer Training School sterilized patients despite family objections. The probe’s auditor, E.H. Williams, reported “a social worker for the training school had induced some of the parents of inmates to give consent for sterilization operations by representing that they were signing petitions for release of their children.” The Beloit State Industrial School in Kansas for girls under sixteen years of age underwent similar scrutiny in 1937 and announced that sterilization operations would be limited in the future. Kathryn O’Laughlin McCarthy, a former congresswoman involved in the investigation, stated: “Parents’ please did not stop these wholesale sterilizations. … Apparently the operations were performed as punishment rather than for any special good to society. One girl was sterilized because she had a high temper.” McCarthy reportedly lamented that girls were “deprived of motherhood without any apparent reason” because of the institution’s use of sterilization as a punishment. These stories show that families were often told incorrect information about what they were agreeing to for the patient’s care, or that sterilizations still took place regardless of if they protested.

A 1935 newspaper article from California demonstrated that state and medical officials could also sometimes sidestep consent from an individual or family. On March 19, 1935, The San Francisco Examiner reported the stories of two women from Contra County who were unwilling victims of sterilization. One woman, Frances Herrera, stated:
I was starved into submitting to the operation by Mrs. McCord [Ruth McCord, fugitive relief director] … She withheld food from me and my five sons and five daughters for four months. I agreed when I couldn’t stand it for the children’s sake any longer. My husband refused to sign the release. Now he has left me — he said he wanted a normal wife and the operation has broken my health.

Although California never formally institutionalized Herrera like the majority of documented sterilization victims in the state, nor did the state technically force her to agree to sterilization, her testimony demonstrated that state officials could use other methods to drive individuals to accept sterilization procedures that they did not want. The other woman featured in the story, Theresa Sweeney, explained:
When my husband, John, was laid off by an oil company, Mrs. McCord made our life a hell on earth. She cut off our food, gas, and light, and had us ejected, saying we could have help if John would submit to the operation. … I have only two children, John, 4, and Kathleen, 3. Kathleen was born in January 1933. I went back to the hospital shortly afterwards for a minor operation. I don’t know what they did to me, but we haven’t had any children since then.

Sweeney’s belief that she was sterilized without consent or knowledge during a routine medical procedure in California was not an outlying experience. As historians and documentary filmmakers have shown, medical professionals in California withheld pain medication during labor to coerce patients into agreeing to sterilization, or at other times performed sterilization procedures upon women without their consent. This practice resulted in the 1978 class action lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, in which a group of Latina women sued the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center for performing coercive sterilization procedures while they received gynecological or obstetric care. Together, these testimonies reflected that consent could result from coercion and did not necessarily mean that individuals willingly agreed to these procedures.