American Eugenics

American Eugenics

From Puerto Rico to ICE

To understand how the U.S. government really feels about “freedom” and “human rights,” you don’t need to look at foreign wars, genocides we fund or commit, or grand speeches on democracy. Just look at Puerto Rico.

One of the most horrifying experiments that Washington decided to inflict on its population was the forced sterilizations of Puerto Rican women, a vast program that by the 1970s had sterilized roughly a third of women on the island, most often without informed consent.

A U.S. territory, citizens on paper, and the government still saw them as expendable test subjects for population control.

The stated justification was a mix of racism, classism, and economic “concern.” Puerto Rico was “overpopulated,” too many poor brown people, they said. So the obvious fix was to clip the population, rather than addressing poverty, colonial exploitation, or lack of opportunity.

It was easier and cheaper to cut the wombs out of working-class women.

Doctors and policymakers used the safe language of “public health” and “family planning,” but what it really was in practice was eugenics. The same mindset that gave us American sterilization programs against the disabled, Black women in the South, and Native women across reservations.