The movie, “La Operación”, was unfortunately not a complete surprise to me. In another class I’m taking, we are reading Not Quite White by Matt Wray. An entire chapter of the book is devoted to the Eugenics movement, explaining its origins, its mission and citing specific cases. The case most fully developed in the book is the case of Carrie Buck, a woman who was deemed “feeble-minded” and since the state decided that she would therefore most likely give birth to more feeble minded people, she should be sterilized. Carrie Buck appealed her decision and eventually the case went to the Supreme Court—she lost.
What struck me the most out of this case was the wording used by the doctors and eugenicists who were all advocating Carrie’s sterilization. There were no definite terms used because there was no way to predict the exact intelligence of offspring that hadn’t even been conceived yet, and still her sterilization was demanded by the law.
While I am certainly completely in favor of sterilization by choice, forced sterilization is cruel and inhumane. The idea that a woman is no longer in control of her own body and treated as though she cannot make her own choices is violating and degrading. I understand the idea that sterilization in many cases is an attempt to prevent the poor from growing poorer but I think that removing the woman’s right to choose is unfair. I would hope that providing families with education about birth control and even as a last case scenario, sterilization, and allowing them to make an informed choice would be considered a more appropriate means of avoiding increased poverty—regardless of race, class, or perceived intelligence level.
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I appreciate your analysis, and I want to push you to challenge even more of the assumptions underlying a lot of forced sterilization and eugenics debates. For example: I've noticed in several of these posts that there is a prevalent assumption that poor people made themselves poor, are making themselves more poor, and will get even more poor each time they take on the care of another child. Here's a question: when did we decide that poor people are responsible for their own "poor-ness"?! There are economic structures that consolidate wealth into the hands (and wallets, bank accounts, investments, and real estate) of a relatively small pool of people, while simultaneously making it more difficult for people without much money to keep what they earn. In fact, consider the "working poor," a revision of the title given to people hovering around or below the poverty line to demonstrate that they aren't poor because they *simply* aren't "trying" to be anything else. In fact, there are blatant barriers to upward mobility, even here in Georgia. Take a look at this article: http://www.cbpp.org/3-27-07sfp-pr-ga.htm
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