By: Sydney Witte

Cut, tied, and sterilized like an animal on the vet counter. Thousands of Mexican-American women in cities like El Paso and Los Angeles were sterilized without consent by trusted medical professionals in an act to control breeding.

In 1975, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the Los Angeles County General Hospital by 10 working-class Mexican immigrant women. This case went on to be titled, Madrigal v. Quilligan. These women were told to have the operation “because her children were a burden on the government.” A dissertation & theses called “Women sterilized as they give birth: population control, eugenics, and social protest in the twentieth-century United States” by Virginia Rose Espino states, that the evidence in the trial demonstrated that the doctors at the Los Angeles County Hospital sought to lower the birth rate of women of Mexican heritage.

The doctors and individuals behind the sterilization believed that the Mexican-American women were having large families to make America more Hispanic. However, large families are a part of the culture that these women come from.

Reproduction of women has been a repeated issue in history even birth control pills were a part of eugenics and unethical clinical trials.

During the 1970s these women’s right to bear children was blindly taken away from them. 20,000 women in California alone, had their reproductive organs cut, tied, and sterilized permanently like a lock welded shut. There was no key that would undo this life-changing procedure that changed the lives of women forever.