Quote:
Originally Posted by Ron Greening
I just wanted to come back to note that coerced and/or improperly informed sterilization has been a common practise for indigenous people in many health centres in Canada. I think that this practice, at least, has ceased and is considered broadly wrong now. (Lest my previous comment be read as smug and condemning from my Canadian-ness.)
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California has a particularly ugly history of state-sponsored eugenics, which included decades-long campaigns of nonconsensual sterilization of tens of thousands of women in "undesirable" categories--mostly poor, Latina, and Black:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449330/
Similar allegations about the LaSalle-run facility, if true, fit into a long pattern of institutionalized white supremacy based eugenics in the United States. It's a form of genocide. "An estimated 40% of Native American women (60,000-70,000 women) and 10% of Native American men in the United States underwent sterilization in the 1970s."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugeni...American_Women
[Edited to say: Presumably some of those women gave fully informed consent. It's the widespread absence of fully informed consent that concerns me, not the fact that sterilizations took place. I have heard multiple firsthand reports, quoted in the San Diego Union-Tribune and attributed to named people, in which immigrant detainees in ICE or ICE-contracted custody have said they were forced to sign consent forms that they could not understand--including to separate them from their minor children, whom they have now not seen for years.]
That said, I realize that the specifics of this particular complaint are mostly second-hand, and need further investigation, especially given the timing so close to a major election. But one hopes that skepticism about the motives and timing of these particular allegations will lead to investigation and evidence-seeking, rather than blanket dismissal of the accusations as mere propaganda.