The Involuntary Sterilization of Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf

Background: Ebony magazine was founded in 1945 with a focus on Black culture and politics. This excerpt from a 1973 article described how low-income African American women and girls were forced to undergo medically unnecessary sterilization. Ebony highlighted the experience of three teenage girls, Minnie Lee, Mary Alice Relf, and Nial Cox, who were permanently sterilized after being deceived and pressured by welfare caseworkers. Their families sought compensation and tried to stop practices that led to many low-income and women of color losing their reproductive autonomy. Coming just months after the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, their cases demonstrated that although abortion became legal throughout the U.S., many women still lacked the ability to freely determine whether, and when, they could bear children. 

On June 13, two representatives of the federally financed Montgomery Community Action Agency called on Mrs. Minnie Relf, an illiterate welfare mother of four, to tell her that her two youngest daughters, Mary Alice, 14, and Minnie Lee, 12, needed some shots. (Agency officials, incidentally, have claimed that young Minnie Lee Relf is mentally retarded.) The nature of the shots, according to Mrs. Relf, seemed to be uncertain; but, believing that the agency had the best interests of her daughters’ health in mind, Mrs. Relf consented - and subsequently signed an informed consent release. “I put an X on a paper,” she said later. And, armed with that “X,” the agency, which operates a family planning clinic also federally supported, affected its own version of population control - ostensibly because of those “boys…hanging around.” (After the Relf case came to light, it was discovered that for the past 15 months, federally sponsored birth control clinics around the nation have sterilized at least 80 other minors.)

In July, at a crowded press conference in New York City, Nial Ruth Cox, an angry, unwed black mother, accompanied by her lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), revealed that eight years earlier, when she was pregnant with her only child, she too had been forced to undergo permanent sterilization in New Bern, N.C. Miss Cox, who is 26 years old, had agreed to the sterilization, she said, because she had been told it would be a temporary measure and also because she had been warned that if she did not agree, her family would cease to receive welfare payments.
 

Source: Jack Slater, “Sterilization: Newest Threat to the Poor,” Ebony, October 1973, 150-156.