For Decades, California's Mental Health System Targeted Latinas for Sterilization Annie-Rose Strasser - Think Progress
go to original June 4, 2013

Latina women in California’s mental health system were disproportionately targeted for forced sterilization for seventy years, according to new research by the University of Michigan.

Between 1909 and 1979, Latina women made up between 20 and 30 percent of the total sterilizations for mental health patients in California. It was during those years that California had in place a law that allowed the state to forcibly sterilize “feeble-minded” women, among others, based on the assumption that their offspring would suffer from the same “problems” that they did:

Various rationales were employed to justify a forced sterilization, including sexual deviance, being labeled as “feeble-minded,” suffering from epilepsy, being an out-of-wedlock adolescent without a support system, or having an I.Q. of 70 or lower. Many of the women sterilized in California were of Mexican origin, came from families disrupted by trans-border migratory patterns and had limited access to education.

Read the rest at Think Progress

Photo credit: University of Michigan

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