September 22, 2020

By Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille

The accusation was jarring. We would say shocking, but with immigrant children stuffed into cages with limited and substandard medical care, the doctoring of CDC documents by Trump administration officials, and continuing revelations about mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have reached a point where almost nothing is shocking. Nevertheless, it was a punch to the gut when a whistleblower report filed by Dawn Wooten, a nurse, alleged that immigrant women detained by ICE were subjected to partial or full hysterectomies without consent at Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center – a private detention facility contracted with the Department of Homeland Security.

What came to mind was the horror of the experiments on men, women and children in Nazi concentration camps during World War II that were led by Josef Mengele, the “angel of death.” However, we often fail to remember that the Nazi “experiments” had their genesis in the eugenics movement in the United States, a movement funded by some of the most prominent philanthropists of the early 20th century.  

“I had several detained women on numerous occasions that would come to me and say, ‘Ms. Wooten, I had a hysterectomy,’” Wooten, who formerly worked at the detention center told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. She claimed that the women would ask her why, when they visited the doctor, they’d received procedures such as full hysterectomies, removal of fallopian tubes and vaginal sonograms. Wooten had no answers for the women.

The doctor performing the surgeries has been identified as Mahendra Amin. In 2015, Amin and a group of other doctors paid $520,000 in fines following a federal investigation to resolve allegations that they filed false Medicare and Medicaid claims.

As The Forward’s Talya Zax reported, “While not yet substantiated, Wooten’s report, filed alongside claims by four lawyers representing women detained at the center, made headlines across the country. (A lawyer for Amin told The New York Times that Amin denies all accusations.)”

The facts of the ICE facility case, including whether or how many women received hysterectomies, are still unclear.  According to The Guardian: “An Associated Press review of medical records for four women and interviews with lawyers revealed growing allegations that Amin performed surgeries and other procedures on detained immigrants that they never sought or didn’t fully understand.

“Although some procedures could be justified based on problems documented in the records, the women’s lack of consent or knowledge raises severe legal and ethical issues, lawyers and medical experts said.”

Is the Georgia Case in the American Eugenics Tradition?

While eugenics is firmly associated with the Nazis, The Forward’s Zax pointed out that “while the Nazis made eugenics-based interventions, including a program of mass forced sterilization, infamous, their inspiration came from the United States, which spent much of the 20th century deploying the practice against groups including Black people, Native Americans, Mexican Americans and people with disabilities.”

A 2018 PBS documentary titled “The Eugenics Crusade,” “illustrates how the utopian idea of contrived natural selection to reduce societal ills insinuated its way into the American mainstream, and just as quickly absorbed the culture’s prejudices,” The Forward’s PJ Grisar wrote in his review, the alleged forced hysterectomies at the ICE detention center reveal that eugenics is not necessarily a “bogus relic now universally dismissed by the scientific community as a racist doctrine that misunderstands sociological factors, … [but] eerie echoes of the current discourse around immigration.”

According to Talya Zax, “In the 20th century, 32 states “legalized compulsory sterilization, laws that resulted in approximately 65,000 American men and women being involuntarily stripped of their ability to have children, mostly while institutionalized in mental hospitals. The laws were a distinctly American invention: Indiana’s 1907 legalization of the practice established the world’s first program for compulsory sterilizations conducted under the auspices of a government. In the 1927 case Buck vs. Bell, the Supreme Court determined that forced sterilization was constitutional. In the decision, which still stands today, chief justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously declared that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Zax pointed out that “Emerging in the late 1800s, the field revolved around the belief that humans might speed the process of natural selection by systematically excising supposedly undesirable characteristics from the population — which meant, practically, ensuring that those seen to carry such characteristics could not reproduce.”

While eugenics was adopted around the world, it was particularly resonant in the U.S. White people feared the loss of power to the reproductive zeal of other races. And even though Theodore Roosevelt opposed eugenics, he warned that “race suicide” was coming down the pike if white people didn’t have more children.

“Those fears helped win the eugenics movement the support, at the tail end of the gilded age, of foundations established by some of that era’s wealthiest families — the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Harrimans — even as one of the most prominent eugenics organizations, the American Eugenics Society, advocated for eventually sterilizing a full 10th of American citizens,” Zax wrote. And most of those people were “poor and black.”  

Hitler praised forced sterilization in Mein Kampf his blueprint for seizing power in Germany. “Of course, it is not our model German Republic,” he wrote, “but the United States.” “The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind,” Hitler wrote to Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race and a celebrity among the 1920s American intelligentsia. (F. Scott Fitzgerald nodded to his work with some approbation in The Great Gatsby.)”

Hitler kept up communications with prominent eugenicists, especially in California, “which was responsible for the most widespread use of forced sterilization in the United States; current estimates suggest that the state accounted for close to a third of all American forced sterilizations,” Zax noted. Interestingly, California was one of the states with numerous German Nazi-supporting groups actively organized to seize control prior to World War II.

A posting on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website titled “The Biological State: Nazi Racial Hygiene,” notes: “On July 14, 1933, the Nazi dictatorship fulfilled the long-held dreams of eugenics proponents by enacting the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, based on a voluntary sterilization law drafted by Prussian health officials in 1932. The new Nazi law was coauthored by Falk Ruttke, a lawyer, Arthur Gütt, a physician and director of public health affairs, and Ernst Rüdin, a psychiatrist and early leader of the German racial hygiene movement. Individuals who were subject to the law were those men and women who ‘suffered’ from any of nine conditions assumed to be hereditary: feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, genetic epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea (a fatal form of dementia), genetic blindness, genetic deafness, severe physical deformity, and chronic alcoholism.”

In California, sterilization – not outlawed until 1979 -- often targeted Mexican immigrants, described as “immigrants of an undesirable type.” i

According to Native Voices, In 1976, “A study by the U.S. General Accounting Office finds that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 American Indian women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO finds that 36 women under age 21 were sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21. Two years earlier, an independent study by Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four American Indian women had been sterilized without her consent. PInkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had ‘singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.’”

A 2013 report by Reveal, a project of the Center for Investigative Journalism, found that “Doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010 without required state approvals.” The report noted that “Former inmates and prisoner advocates maintain that prison medical staff coerced the women, targeting those deemed likely to return to prison in the future.”

With the death of Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, it is well understood that women’s “right to choose” is in great jeopardy. Less well understood is that “choice” encompasses all reproductive rights including the right to bear children, and the right to exercise fully informed consent over medical procedures. It is difficult to believe that the complaints of women in the Georgia ICE facility (if substantiated) are an aberration rather than another example of an ongoing tradition of eugenics by another name. 

Please support BuzzFlash financially if you want to help defeat Donald Trump, who is endangering our lives. BuzzFlash exposes Trump's corruption and his dismantling of our democracy. Don't just pass this over. Click and scroll down donation page to receive a gift as our gratitude.

Follow BuzzFlash on @twitter

Continue the conversation at the BuzzFlash Nation group on Facebook