The Continuing Struggle Against Genocide: Indigenous Women’s Reproductive Rights

Excerpt from Article, Page 71-72:

"Women have always been the backbone and keepers of life of the indigenous nations of North America. Most precontact indigenous civilizations functioned as matriarchies, and women of those cultures did not espouse subordination to males, whether such males were Native or from the white/Euro-American culture. Considering their traditional significance in the continuation of Native cultures, it should not come as a surprise that European colonizers often targeted Native women. The assaults on Native women continue to be a goal of some descendants of these European colonizers.

Ironically, while middle-class white America applauded a newfound freedom over reproductive rights during the 1960s and 1970s, many policy makers and physicians targeted Native women for involuntary birth control and sterilization. Estimates indicate that, from the early to mid-1960s up to 1976, between 3,400 and 70,000 Native women -out of only 100,000 to 150,000 women of childbearing age- were coercively, forcibly, or unwittingly sterilized permanently by tubal ligation or hysterectomy. Native women seeking treatment in Indian Health Service (IHS) hospitals and with IHS-contracted physicians were allowed neither the basic right of informed consent prior to sterilization nor the right to refuse the operation. IHS also subjected mentally [disabled] Indian girls and women to a contraceptive known as DepoProvera before it received approval from the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) in 1992.

...This research examines the Native American and Euro-American cultures' differing views toward women and birth. It provides an over-view of eugenics and how it used a combination of biological and racist rhetoric to justify offenses against Native women and their capacity to give birth. In addition, I assert that population-control ideas (ostensibly aimed at ending poverty) legitimated these offenses in the minds of many physicians who performed the procedures. Finally, I investigate the federal government's role in the genocide by examining evidence found in court cases, the Indian Health Service (IHS), the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) records, and reports from Native American community leaders." (71-72).