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- By Elyse Wild
In 1972, Jean Whitehorse went to an the Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, N.M. treat a ruptured appendix. The 22-year-old mother left her treatment as the victim of a human rights abuse that prevented her from ever having more children.
“I became a victim of forced sterilization, in the country my father risked his for life as a Navajo Code Talker,” Whitehorse (Diné) told New Mexico lawmakers during testimony for a memorial passed last week that will make New Mexico the first state in the United States to formally investigate the forced and coerced sterilization of Native American women.
During the visit to Gallup IHS hospital that led to her sterilization, Whitehorse said she was rushed into emergency surgery and was presented with a flurry of forms. A nurse helped her move her hand across consent documents for medical procedures, including one that would lead to her sterilization.
A few years later, when Whitehorse struggled to conceive a second child, she learned she had undergone tubal ligation that day in Gallup. She would never be able to carry children again.
Whitehorse is just one of thousands of Native American women who underwent procedures without informed consent that rendered them unable to carry children. Forced sterilizations were done by the IHS, the federal agency tasked with providing health care to millions of Native people across the United States. The procedures were first done in 1907 and were reported as recently as 2018, according to the memorial text.
The New Mexico memorial was sponsored by five lawmakers, including two Native American women, Sens. Shannon Pinto (Dine) and Angel Charley (Laguna/Dine). It requests that the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department and Commission on the Status of Women conduct an investigation into the scope and ongoing effects of the abusive practice.
By the 1970s, between 25 and 50 percent of Native women of childbearing age in the United States were sterilized, mainly by the IHS. A large volume of the procedures was performed at IHS facilities in four service areas, including Albuquerque and Gallup, which serve healthcare to thousands of Native people in the Four Corners.
The abuse was first made public with a 1976 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, but the story remains incomplete. The report only accounted for IHS medical records from 1972-1975 and included just four of 12 IHS service areas.
New Mexico Representative Patricia Roybal Caballero (Piro-Manso-Tiwa), a trainer and sexual violence advocate with the Office of Family Representation and Advocacy, told lawmakers at a Senate hearing on Feb. 3 that she was almost a victim of the practice.
Years ago, she was preparing to undergo a standard medical procedure after a miscarriage and was given her consent forms to sign. Already under sedation, she nearly signed a form consenting to a hysterectomy when her husband noticed and stopped her. Had he not, she would have been unable to carry children and would not have given birth to her son, now 38.
Roybal Caballero didn’t speak openly about the incident until last summer, when she heard testimony from other Native women who were victims of the forced sterilization practice.
“They gave me courage,” Caballeroi said.
Caballero noted that forced and coerced sterilization of Native women still occurs.
“Because of language barriers, poverty barriers, because women of color are vulnerable in these ways, because of cultural protections, we are being taken advantage of,” Caballero said. “And there is a concerted effort… in my opinion, to limit our ability to bear children.”
Nicolle Gonzalez (Dine), a certified nurse-midwife and founder of the Changing Women Initiative, an Albuquerque-based birth center and reproductive rights group serving Native families, told Native News Online she hopes the memorial leads to more support and funding for Native American birth workers.
“Part of the healing work that needs to happen is that they acknowledge the wrongdoing that happened, an official apology, and some sort of pathway forward of some reconciliation, whether that's funding or opportunities for organizations who are doing that healing work and integrating culturally birth supported practices,” she said.
Gonzalez added that the New Mexico investigation could lead to a national probe.
“It happened at other IHS facilities around the country,” she said. “Is there a potential for Congress to put a hearing through the Senate committee of Indian Affairs? Yes. Could there be a national study and an inquiry that really studies where this happened and what the implications for reconciliation repair? Absolutely.”
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