Migrant women forcibly sterilised in the US

Originally posted: 12th November 2020

In early September of this year, reports of a forced sterilization project of migrant Latin American women have come from the Irwin County detention center in Georgia, US. They claim Dr. Mahendra Amin performed numerous hysterectomies on women detained by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) which were not medically necessary and without gaining consent. Amnesty International has responded to these distressing accounts declaring them ‘deeply alarming’.

The information comes from Dawn Wooten, a nurse working at the detention center. She has spent much time with the detained women and gives a sickening account of the “jarring medical neglect” they have been subject to. She writes, “When I met all these women who had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp”. She claims the center did not seek to gain the proper consent from the women and, in some instances, misled them about the medical procedure they were receiving, sometimes being portrayed as an appendicitis treatment. In one case, Wooten said, a woman had not been properly anesthetized and overheard the doctor say he’d taken out the wrong ovary.

The language barrier between the women and officials means they are left in the dark on why the procedures are taking place. When an explanation was actually given, many women claim they were given conflicting reasons. According to Wooten’s report, when someone protested or spoke out they were sent into solitary confinement.

These allegations come alongside other horrific claims of sexual and physical abuse of children and detainees as reported by The Associated Press in June 2019. Consequently, US migrant detainees are living in inhumane and cruel conditions. One woman told Wooten, “If it wasn’t for my faith in God, I think I would have gone insane and just broke down and probably gone as far as hurting myself… There are a lot of people here who end up in medical trying to kill themselves because of how crazy it is”.

The sad truth is, the US has a long and shocking history of eugenics, which has always targeted women of colour. Since the early 20th century they have led the field of race science, championing the idea that “undesirable” traits should and could be bred out of the population. In fact, everything the Nazi’s knew about the study of race science was learnt from America. In light of the report, one has to wonder how much progress the US has actually made.

We live in a time of widespread communication and social motivation that has led to huge awareness of world injustices, such as the mass coverage and outrage over the incarceration of Muslim and other ethnic groups in China. So it is shocking to find out how little is known of this violation of human rights on American soil, especially since the report has recieved relatively minor media coverage. The supposed champion of modernity and morality has treated migrants in a way that ‘constitutes human rights violations and genocide according to the standards established by the UN’, as one newspaper wrote. A final point for consideration is the clear hypocritical values bestowed by the US administration in recent years, particularly within Trump’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement; how can ‘all lives matter’ if they are sterilizing desperate immigrant women who want nothing more than a better life? However, with Biden’s new less aggressive immigration policies soon to take office, there is hope this barbaric practice will end, creating a better future for migrant women and detainees in general.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/.../usa-reports-forced...