Indigenous Women Sterilized
Background: In the early 1970s, Dr. Connie Uri, a Choctaw and Cherokee physician, began to investigate the reproductive health care provided by the Indian Health Service (IHS). On a trip to Oklahoma, Uri collected hundreds of stories about medically unnecessary sterilizations performed by IHS-run hospitals. Triple Jeopardy, a newspaper published by the Third World Women’s Alliance, an organization that advocated for the political rights of women of color within feminist, civil rights, and reproductive justice movements, reported her findings in 1975. Uri’s research inspired further investigation by the General Accounting Office, a federal agency, which determined that IHS facilities failed to follow federal guidelines requiring informed consent and prohibiting the sterilization of women below the age of 21.
Indian women of Oklahoma have long wanted to challenge the federal government its racist policy and specifically, the practice of enforced sterilization of Indian women. It has gone on for too long. When Dr. Connie Uri visited Oklahoma this summer, she became aware that something was very rotten there. Indian women had approached her at a Pow-wow to tell her of the monstrous criminal practices at the Indian hospital in Claremore, Oklahoma. She promised to return there at a later date when testimony could be heard with more time and care.
When Dr. Uri returned to Oklahoma in August, to her astonishment, she found that word of her arrival spread to neighboring Indian communities by Oklahoma A.I.M. had brought more than 400 Indian women and men waiting. They circled around a large tipi waiting their turn to give testimony and support. For four days and nights they demonstrated and talked of the horrendous tales of butchery at the hand of that Indian hospital run by the federal government. They talked of mysterious deaths, young Indian women receiving post-partum sterilization, hysterectomies, and tube ties for minor internal problems, young Indian men receiving vasectomies instead of good contraceptive counsel.
In July of this year alone, on eight female surgery days, 52 Indian women were sterilized, the director of nurses reported to Dr. Uri when she was questioned. Dr. Uri realized she had uncovered a Nazi-like factory and she called the Justice Department who came into the
case.
Indian “social workers” had been hired to tell Indian women to quit having babies. Indians in Oklahoma are so poor they are forced to sell themselves and their people. The racist doctors had more than a hand in all this. Often, some of them told the Indian women it was better they didn't populate the world. Sterilization of women is extermination when it is coerced. It is forced upon Third World women particularly and Indian women are a special target for this government is hellbound to help the giant corporations steal Indian land and continue the total extermination of the race.
Sterilization is a subtle form of murder of a people. No case merits instant or immediate sterilization procedures without review from a non-racist board of professionals, Dr. Connie Uri says. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare is very well supplied with lots of
money for this program of racial genocide. We must pressure The Congress to delete this money from the budget; we must demand that the Senate make an investigation on a national level of all the racist practices of sterilization in the hospitals, and bring pressure to bear on the President who claims he is against all excessive spending. Sisters, go out and gather the evidence, form your committees so that we can further expose the crime of enforced sterilization.
Source: Ishi Houmah, “Indian Women Sterilized,” Triple Jeopardy, June 1975, 16.