How Should a Physician Respond to Discovering Her Patient Has Been Forcibly Sterilized?

Forced sterilization has a long history in the United States. Because sterilization requires surgical skill, physicians have been the lone professionals engaging in this practice, although they were not the only experts or Americans to hold eugenic and neo-eugenic views. But physicians have also been whistleblowers who exposed sterilization abuse and led efforts to end it. The commentary on this case suggests that physicians should respond along those lines.

Locating the voices of the sterilized.

Scholars have been studying eugenics and sterilization for years, but only recently have some begun to examine these issues from the point of view of those sterilized. This is in large part because so few records containing the voices of the sterilized exist or are accessible to scholars. This essay examines my own effort to recover the voices of women sterilized in the post-baby boom United States from the "bottom up" and includes my own experience researching and writing Fit to Be Tied?: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1960-1984. It represents the beginning of a discussion about locating and using sources containing the voices of the sterilized and working with the limitations inherent to them.