ABSTRACT
In 1977, women workers in the lead pigment department of an American Cyanamid plant in West Virginia were given the ‘choice’ of being sterilized or moving to lower-paying jobs. Subtle sterilization abuses include situations in which a woman or man legally consents to sterilization, but the social conditions in which they do so are abusive—the conditions of their lives constrain their capacity to exercise genuine reproductive choice and autonomy. During the 1950s and 1960s in the South, a new form of blatant sterilization abuse emerged: numerous cases of Black women and girls sterilized without their knowledge and/or consent came to the attention of civil rights workers. The potential for subtle sterilization abuse through medically unnecessary hysterectomy is tremendous. The disproportionate sterilization rates among welfare and IHS women reflect a patterned institutional discrimination on the basis of population control of poor people and people of color, that is, class, race and welfare related.
