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Chapter Three “They Breed Like Rabbits” The Forced Sterilization of Mexican-Origin Women A ntonia Hernández had just begun her first job as a staff attorney at the Los Angeles County Center for Law and Justice when Bernard Rosenfeld, a resident at lacmc, approached her with data proving that women were being coercively sterilized there.1 Rosenfeld provided her with information on more than 180 cases of primarily Spanish-surname women who were sterilized during childbirth. All were approached by hospital staff who recommended the procedure during the late stages of their labor, after they had already been administered large doses of Demerol or Valium. Many of the women required emergency cesarean sections, and following their deliveries there was no signed consent form for tubal ligation or any other record of their agreement to the procedure in their files. Rosenfeld had gone through the medical records of hundreds upon hundreds of Spanish-surname patients; reviewing their indications for cesarean section, he recognized a clear pattern of coercion. The notes on one twentythree -year-old patient with one child read: “Failure to deliver baby with forceps. Caesarean section needed. Consents signed in markedly distressed handwriting, in English. No medical indication for sterilization.” A month and a half later, upon a visit to the Family Planning Clinic to request birth control, this patient was fitted with an intra-uterine device (IUD), which she wore for at least a year before she learned that she had been sterilized.2 With so many similar cases documented, Rosenfeld believed that the data proved what he had seen with his own eyes during his medical residency: the targeted and coercive sterilization of African American and Mexican women. Hernández followed up on Rosenfeld’s information, locating and talking with many of the women whom he suspected had been coercively sterilized. In an interview with the author, she recalled: I remember driving around city terrace. It took a long time. All I can tell you is that this case consumed my life. . . . I must have interviewed T4292.indb 35 T4292.indb 35 7/27/07 7:22:39 AM 7/27/07 7:22:39 AM fertile matters 36 a hundred women. I remember driving all over East L.A. with a map looking for addresses of these women. And then I had the difficult job of saying to many of the women, “Do you know you were sterilized?” It was a very painful process. And some of them knew, but they all had the misconception that their tubes were tied but could be untied. Hernández was often faced with the responsibility of encouraging each woman to take legal action. However, many women who wanted to participate in the lawsuit could not because their statute of limitations had expired; others were worried that if they testified against the hospital, they or members of their family would be deported. In the end, two separate cases were filed against lacmc. Andrade et al. v. Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center was filed by Richard Cruz, a lawyer most noted for his founding of Católicos Por La Raza, a Catholic Chicano activist organization. Cruz also worked with assistance from the offices of Belli, Ashe, and Choulos, who provided co-counsel and split the costs of the case.3 Cruz’s clients were forcibly sterilized between 1972 and 1973, and because their complaints fell within the statue of limitations, each asked for $2 million in compensation for what they had endured as a result of their sterilization.4 Their suit charged nurses and doctors at lacmc with battery and claimed that “the government in combination with the University of Southern California and health professionals and administrators accomplished a massive ‘push’ of unlawful sterilization operations between 1968 and 1974 at defendant hospital.”5 Cruz also argued that there was “no way around the word genocide” when considering the abuses that occurred , and he condemned the medical practitioners on moral grounds.6 It is unclear why Andrade never went to court. Before examining the details of what occurred at lacmc, it is important to understand the context that made sterilization a common practice. The Advent of Surgical Sterilization Academics and others typically define sterilization abuse as “the misinformed , coerced, or unknowing termination of the reproductive capacity of women and men.”7 The long and well-researched history of sterilization abuse in the United States has demonstrated that practitioners of coercive sterilization have targeted their subjects according to race, class, and...

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