Forced sterilization and the "Mississippi appendectomy"
Into the 1970s, Black women were sterilized without consent so routinely in the South that the practice was nicknamed the "Mississippi appendectomy." Fannie Lou Hamer was a victim; the Relf sisters' case finally exposed it.
Key figures
Coerced sterilization of Black women persisted long after the eugenics era. The civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer went into a Mississippi hospital in 1961 to have a tumor removed and was given a hysterectomy without her consent — an abuse so common that Black Southerners called it the "Mississippi appendectomy." In 1973 the case of the Relf sisters — two Black girls, aged 12 and 14, sterilized in Alabama after their mother was made to sign a form she could not read — brought a federal lawsuit (Relf v. Weinberger) that revealed an estimated 100,000–150,000 poor, mostly Black and Latina women were being sterilized each year under federally funded programs, and forced new consent rules. Reproductive control was one more way the medical system treated Black bodies as less than fully their owners'.
Resources
Articles·2
Hamer''s nonconsensual hysterectomy and the routine sterilization of Black Southern women.
The 1973 case exposing the federally funded forced sterilization of Black and poor women.
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations — the links rarely drawn together.
- part of·ThreadMedical Racism
Coerced sterilization of Black women into the 1970s.