Ice hysterectomy allegations in line with US's long and racist history of eugenics

An Ice detention center in Georgia is reportedly the site of a mass involuntary sterilization project. A whistleblower report published by the non-profit Project South alleges that large numbers of migrant women held at the Irwin county detention center, a privately run facility that imprisons undocumented immigrants, received hysterectomies that they did not want and which were not medically necessary.

The allegations reported by Project South were first made in a formal complaint by a nurse working at the detention center, Dawn Wooten, who describes the conditions there and conversations she had with imprisoned women in detail. The hysterectomies were all allegedly performed by the same outside gynecologist, Mehendra Amin, of Douglas, Georgia. Wooten says that one migrant woman referred to Amin as the “uterus collector”. Amin told The Intercept that he had only done “one or two hysterectomies in the past two [or] three years.” Responding to the allegations, he said “Everything is wrong” and urged Intercept reporters to “talk to the hospital administrator” for more information.

Related: Nancy Pelosi demands investigation into hysterectomy claims at Ice centre

The women say they were not told why they were having hysterectomies, with some saying that they were given conflicting reasons for the procedures or reprimanded when asked about them. Wooten’s account in the Project South report was corroborated by two lawyers, who told NBC News that four women in the facility whom they represent, had been sterilized without medical cause and without their consent. According to the Project South report, a detained woman at the Irwin county center said: “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.”

As horrific as the allegations are, it’s not likely that either the Irwin county officials or Dr Amin were experimenting. More likely, they knew exactly what they were doing. If true, the allegations of forced sterilizations would make the Irwin county detention center only the latest in America’s long history of eugenics, which has disproportionately targeted women of color.

In the early 20th century, white American intellectuals were pioneers of race science, advancing the idea that “undesirable” traits could and should be bred out of the population with government planning and selective, involuntary sterilization programs. Everything the Nazis knew about eugenics, they learned from the United States. The 1927 Buck v Bell supreme court case, in which the court ruled that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize a 20-year-old named Carrie Buck against her will, led to an era of enthusiastically racist population engineering by state governments. Federally funded eugenics boards were established in 32 states, through which tax dollars were spent to sterilize approximately 70,000 people, mostly women. These programs were used to enforce via state law the racist fiction of America as a white country, and forced sterilization disproportionately targeted Black women.

A separate federal program in the 1960s and 1970s deputized doctors with the Indian Health Service to choose which Native American women they personally deemed fit to reproduce, and to make those women’s reproductive choices for them accordingly. They decided that approximately a quarter of Native American women were unfit to have children, and sterilized them. As with the migrant women at the Irwin county center, many of the Native women were lied to about the nature of their procedures, or were sterilized without their knowledge during other surgeries. Some Native women were told, incorrectly, that the sterilizations were reversible; others were told that they were being treated for appendicitis, or needed to have their tonsils removed. They discovered the truth when they woke up.

Nor was it only state actors who forced sterilization on women. Some gynecologists took it upon themselves to sterilize women they didn’t think should be having children. In her groundbreaking work on the reproductive oppression of Black women, Killing the Black Body, the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts details the case of Clovis Pierce, the only Medicaid-accepting obstetrician in Aiken county, South Carolina. Pierce allegedly demanded that his pregnant Medicaid patients consent to sterilization before he agreed to deliver their children. He reportedly threatened women who resisted with legal action; once, when a woman currently in labor objected to being sterilized, Pierce allegedly had her thrown out of the hospital. One of Pierce’s patients, Dorothy Waters, claims that Pierce explained his rationale for enforcing her sterilization in extremely blunt terms. “Listen here, young lady, this is my tax money paying for this baby and I’m tired of paying for illegitimate children,” he told her. “If you don’t want this sterilization, find another doctor.” Dr Pierce reportedly sterilized 18 women at Aiken county hospital in 1972 alone. Sixteen of them were Black.

None of this is distant history. North Carolina’s eugenics program, through which 7,600 people were sterilized, did not end until 1977. Dr Pierce moved his practice from Aiken to Greenville, South Carolina, and was still practicing as recently as 2012.

Few fictions are as violently defended as the one that posits that America is for white people, and few things make those who cherish this fiction so angry as the specter of non-white women choosing for themselves when to have children and how many children to have. Forced sterilizations like the ones that happened to women at the Irwin county center and to women throughout the nation during the 20th century are first and foremost human rights violations, cruel abridgements of those women’s dignity, autonomy and rights to self determination. But they are also statements of white supremacist hostility, an assertion by white racists of the thing they most hate and fear: new Americans of color.