In a conversation with a fellow student the other day, I mentioned my thesis. He said that when he had lived near Gallup in the 70s or 80s, he had heard rumors of Native American women being forcibly sterilized. He gave me the name and email of someone who might be able to give me more concrete information. As of today, I am still waiting to hear from him; hopefully he's like me and takes a while to get around to checking that horrific cesspool UNM calls an email portal.
I did some googling. At the very least, the whispers of (specifically) the Indian Health Service sterilizing Indian women without fully informed consent or under pretense of appendectomy (surprise, surprise) is at least a very strong rumor/folk legend. But perhaps there's more to it. In 1976, the General Accounting Office issued a report, requested by Sen. James Abourezk (D-SD), investigating the accusations. I am still reading through that and will post my observations soon.
It occurs to me that it's possible this could make a very interesting comparative paper. Two western states: one, fresh out of the heady days of nineteenth-century scientific discovery and caught up in the pre-WWII anti-immigration fervor, sterilizing women, in at least a legal context, for a variety of mostly ridiculous reasons and some men for criminality; the other, well past the days of the civil rights movement, everyone supposedly liberated, and the government sterilizing women for decidedly racial reasons in a shaky, extra-legal context.
Do I have time to research a whole other state? Am I just desperate for a better angle? And I'm not sure I know how write it.
*sigh*
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