100 Skills

 

Buck v. Bell is a US Supreme Court decision from 1927 regarding the constitutional permissibility of forced sterilization. Patricia Hill Collins refers to the majority opinion that Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for this decision, in her 1998 article "Its All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation". The citation that Collins gives for the disturbing passage she quotes from Holmes' opinion is Mark Haller's (1984/1963) book Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought. As Haller, and thus Collins, render it, the passage is as follows: 

"It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped by incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes...Three generations of imbeciles is enough" (Haller 1984, 139; Collins 1998, 76, emphasis added).

 However, as far as I can tell, the text of Holmes' opinion is even more vicious:

"We have seen more than one that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 25 S. Ct. 358, 49 L. Ed. 643, 3 Ann. Cas. 765. Three generations of imbeciles are enough" (emphasis added).

 This decision has apparently never been overturned. 

In a recent article for The Conversation, Jerry Flores is right to put the hysterectomies performed by Dr. Mahendra Amin on women detained by ICE in the Irwin County Detention Center operated by the private company LaSalle Corrections, in the context of the long history of state-sanctioned eugenics in the United States. Indeed, I do not think that Professor Flores is overstating the situation at the ICE detention center, when he writes:

This treatment constitutes human rights violations and genocide according to the standards established by the United Nations. 

 Since nurse Dawn Wooten filed her whistle-blower complaint about the facility, ICE has reportedly released data indicating two full hysterectomies were performed on women detained at Irwin in the past three years. In addition to these hysterectomies, it seems that several other detainees have been subjected to overly aggressive gynecological procedures. The New York Times also reports that a detainee named Yuridia, who sought medical attention for a pain in her rib, was subjected to a surprise vaginal exam. Dr. Amin claimed that Yuridia had complained of heavy menstruation and pelvic pain warranting surgical intervention, although Yuridia herself denies ever having experienced or reported those conditions. Nevertheless, according to the Times, she was subjected to a surgery that was significantly more invasive than she had expected, from which "she woke up to find three incisions on her abdomen and a piece of skin missing from her genital area."

I say that Flores does not overstate the matter by calling it "genocide." Let me explain. 

It could be that Dr. Amin's motivations for medically unnecessary hysterectomies is money, or medical incompetence, or even personal perversion. However, the fact that the women subject to these procedures were being detained by ICE, and were, as Flores describes "Spanish-speaking women and women who spoke various Indigenous languages common in Latin America", bears on the moral significance of these surgeries. 

Perhaps Collins' intersectional analysis of family can be useful here. Collins argues that the traditional family ideal in the United States is hierarchical, with the father on top. The "home" is considered a private space, where women, children, and other dependents are "protected" from the public sphere. The father is the bread-winner, to be sure, but his role is also the protector of the safe haven of the home. The traditional family ideal is also one, Collins argues, that is composed of "blood ties" (69). Although this traditional family ideal has been somewhat challenged and flexed since 1998--perhaps most notably with the legalization of gay marriage nationwide in 2015--the ideal still retains significant sway in our self-understanding on many scales. 

One of the powerful insights of Collins analysis is to show that the application of this family ideal is not limited only to the scale of households, but also extends in a sense to the nation as a whole. The United States is rhetorically cast, and conceived of, as a "family" with children to be controlled and protected, and strangers to be kept out. Collins argues that "just as women's bodies produce children who are part of a socially constructed family grounded in notions of biological kinship, women's bodies produce the population for the national 'family' or nation-state, conceptualized as having some sort of biological oneness" (75). Not only are BIPOC folks stopped at the nation's border if possible, they are prevented, even via surgical means, from contributing children to the US population. 

In light of the significance that the traditional family ideal has in the United States, Collins suggests that opportunities for effectively challenging inequality may actually be available via the transformation of "the very conception of family itself" (78). The radical possibilities afforded by transforming "family" can certainly be seen at the level of individuals. Unmarried partners co-parenting undermine the idea that legal marriage and division of labor by sex is necessary for a family to be a family. Suppose four women who are not romantically or sexually involved with one another adopt children to raise together. Could this be a family? Suppose families of different races merge in second marriages--are the different-race step-siblings, really siblings? Suppose two people united by love never have children--are they a family? Can friends be families? And if we answer "yes" to these questions, do we thereby open up opportunities for a more just society or for human flourishing in general? I suspect that the answers are all "yes". 

Returning to the recently revealed hysterectomies--what would happen if society in the United States embraced the women detained by ICE at Irwin as properly belonging to the national family? As just as much our sisters rather than strangers to be removed, and their potential children as legitimate and indeed welcome in our family? At the very least, it seems clear that as our sisters, these women would not be subjected to, or pressured into medically unnecessary sterilization surgeries without their consent or even full understanding of what is being done to them. For one, I would much rather live in a United States that conceived of itself as a family in this broader and more humane conceptualization of family, rather than in the white supremacist and xenophobic narrow sense of "family" that is evidenced by the atrocities at Irwin.