After the Spanish-American War in 1898, Spain ceded the island of Puerto Rico to the United States. Thus began a period of military government followed by many racist Supreme Court opinions, better-known as the Insular Cases, that established Puerto Rico’s current status as a non-incorporated territory that is at the mercy of Congress and that belongs to, but is not a part of the United States. Then came the Foraker Act (1900) and the Jones Act (1917), the latter of which gave Puerto Rican’s U.S. citizenship. During this time, the president of the United States appointed the Governor of Puerto Rico.
This background is necessary to understand the power the United States has had over Puerto Rico. Moreover, in order to understand a small part of the oppression the U.S. government has implemented in Puerto Rico since 1898, it’s important to learn about the forced sterilization of thousands of Puerto Rican women that took place in the island during the 1930’s and for a few decades after.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a population control policy spread throughout the United States. The policy was characterized for targeting lower income and more “socially inadequate” people; as said by Harry Loughlin, the superintendent of the US Eugenics Record Office. Eugenics is a movement that advocates for practices that will improve the genetic quality of a population by excluding genetic groups deemed as inferior. Through a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, Loughlin successfully influenced the implementation of forced sterilizations of women in 30 states and Puerto Rico.
In 1927, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled, in the case of Buck v. Bell, that “compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, ‘for the protection and health or the state’” was constitutional as it did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision came after Virginia enacted a statute on the matter. The Model Eugenical Sterilization Law was drafted in 1914 by Harry Loughlin; he did so after noticing the small amount of people who were sterilized as a result of early sterilization laws in the U.S. This law would serve as a guide for states to introduce the “eugenical sterilization of the ‘unfit’”. By ‘unfit’ and ‘socially inadequate’, Loughlin meant anyone who was insane to physically weak to anyone who was dependent on government assistance to survive.
For Puerto Rico, forced sterilizations of women began in 1936 when the Puerto Rican government passed Law 116. The law made sterilization free and legal on the island and it offered no other alternative methods of birth control. The government and the International Planned Parenthood Federation implemented the program with U.S. funding. The main purpose of the law, besides sterilizing women, was to “cleanse the race”. Puerto Ricans were very poor, Spanish-speakers, and mostly non-white; forced sterilization served as a way for the U.S. government to stop Puerto Ricans from reproducing, therefore the bloodline would end there. Besides this, they popularized migration to the U.S.
It was thought that sterilizing women would mean that they would fit into the workforce with more ease. They would be free from having to give birth and take care of children, so they would be able to work in the more industrialized economy of Puerto Rico; especially after the implementation of Operation Bootstrap. From the beginning of the program until 1968, an estimated one third of Puerto Rican women had been sterilized. According to Vazquez (1973), in a survey carried out in 1968, 35.3 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 49 who had been married at one point had been sterilized.
The women going through these procedures were not properly educated on it beforehand. This caused regret, mainly because they did not know that the procedure was permanent. Since clinics referred to the procedure as “tying their tubes”, many women thought that it was reversible. In addition, the program did not provide any alternative methods for birth control, so many women opted for sterilization because they had no other choice.
The forced sterilization of women in Puerto Rico occured as a means to control the growth of a population that was mostly made up of poor, non-white, spanish-speaking people who lacked education, because it was not provided for them, and who did not fit the standards to become a part of the U.S.; therefore, the growth of the population had to be controlled somehow. That’s how eugenics and the population control policy came to the island and to many U.S. states.
The forced sterilization that took place was a complete abuse and disregard of women’s reproductive rights by the U.S. government. Forced sterilization was used to deny vulnerable and uneducated women of their reproductive rights in order to fulfill a bigger agenda: controlling the growth of a population that was seen as inadequate, unfit, and inferior and, possibly, erasing it from existance to make way for a more ‘adequate’ race. Reproductive rights for women should mean that women have the right to choose what they will do with their body; no government should ever deny that right to them. Much less should they fund policies that allow for misinformation and experimentation on vulnerable people. While the practice of forced sterilization in Puerto Rico has long ended, issues that need to be resolved still remain.
For more information on this topic, there is a great documentary called “La Operación” (The Operation or Surgery in English) that deals with this topic in a more in depth way. The documentary features interviews with health professionals, politicians, and, most importantly, Puerto Rican women who were sterilized. Furthermore, Puerto Rican women from very poor neighborhoods were used to experiment with birth control pills. Unlike birth control today, when the experiments were happening, birth control was way more potent because they were still in an experimental phase. Many of the women who were experimented on had very bad side effects like nausea, headaches, and vertigo. You can watch this incredibly informative and shocking documentary right here.
References:
Romano. (2008). https://stanford.edu/group/womenscourage/cgi-bin/blogs/familyplanning/20…
U.S. National Library of Medicine. (2010). https://web.archive.org/web/20101016010504/http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/glossary=eugenics
Santiago, F. (2012)http://historiadeprflorenciosantiago.blogspot.com/2012/09/la-operacion.html?m=1
Vázquez Calzada, J. “La esterilización femenina en Puerto Rico,” Revista de Ciencias Sociales 17, no. 3 (1973): 281-308.