The history of legal sterilization dates back to the 1920s, to a time when women were institutionalized for being “feebleminded.” By this time, many Americans had embraced “the theory that intelligence and other personality traits [were] genetically determined and therefore inherited…” Sir Francis Galton pioneered this ideology, referring to it as eugenics. Galton argued, “since intelligence and character are transmitted by descent, society should take steps to encourage the procreation of people of superior stock.” This notion of increasing the reproduction of certain groups of people gave rise to “scientific racism.” According to Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body, “racism provided the theoretical framework for eugenic thinking.” Indeed, eugenic theory influenced the development of the incorrect understanding that races are biologically distinct groups. Further, races were also thought of as being “marked by inherited attributes of inferiority and superiority.” Many Americans accepted this idea that social characteristics were heritable and could be attributed to race. As a consequence, sterilization began to be used as a remedy for social problems. American Eugenicists advocated for compulsory sterilization as a means to eliminate the “socially inadequate” members of society. Public officials argued that mental and social inadequacies were such a threat to the welfare of society that sacrificing young women’s right to bear children was done “for the greater interest of the body politic.” Though not a race, but rather a group of people, the physically and mentally disabled were the first victims of compulsory sterilization. However, as demonstrated in the 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court Case, mental disability was arbitrarily defined.
(CESA) in New York City. The group conducted research into the government’s racist population-control policies, exposing to the public the disproportionately high numbers of Black and Native American women who had been sterilized since the 1940s. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) also brought attention to the failure of “sterilization regulations to protect public assistance recipients from threats that they would lose their welfare funds if they declined a sterilization procedure.” Subsequently, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) issued new regulations that prohibited “federally funded sterilization of any incompetent persons without their ‘un-coerced’ consent.” However, a survey of teaching hospitals in 1975 conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “discovered that 40 percent of those institutions were not even aware of these regulations issued by HEW. Only 30 percent of the hospitals examined by the ACLU were even attempting to comply with the guidelines.” In addition to scrutinizing the government’s racist population control policies, African-American women introduced advocacy against sterilization abuse into the Reproductive Rights Movement of the 1980s. Women of color called for an alternative definition of reproductive freedom. While the emphasis of white women’s activist work was pro-legal abortion, women of color argued that they also need “access to safe, effective birth control methods as well as protection from coercive birth control policies.” African-American women argued that they were in need of better social services and that they deserved the right to raise their children “out of poverty.” These women articulated that coercive sterilization robbed women of “their individual liberty” and violated “principles of bodily integrity and reproductive choice.” African-American women