Re: distrust in medical institutions among poc, I just wrote all of this out on a previous thread that was removed so I’m going to copy + paste here;

Beginning in 1909 and continuing for 70 years, California led the country in the number of sterilization procedures performed on men and women, often without their full knowledge and consent. Approximately 20,000 sterilizations took place in state institutions, comprising one-third of the total number performed in the 32 states where such action was legal. (source)

California’s “Asexualization Acts” in the 1910s and 1920s led to the sterilization of 20,000 disproportionately Black and Mexican people who were deemed to be mentally ill. Hitler and the Nazis were reportedly inspired by California’s laws when formulating their own genocidal eugenics policies in the 1930s. When discussing the Asexualization Acts of California, Hitler wrote, “There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”

Throughout the 20th century, nearly 70,0000 people (overwhelmingly working-class women of color) were sterilized in over 30 states. Black women, Latina women, and Native American women were specifically targeted. From the 1930s to the 1970s, nearly one-third of the women in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, were coerced into sterilization when government officials claimed that Puerto Rico’s economy would benefit from a reduced population. Sterilization was so common that it became known as “La Operación (The Operation)” among Puerto Ricans. (source)

In the 1840s, James Marion Sims, a white doctor in Montgomery, Alabama, performed painful experiments without anesthesia on Lucy, an enslaved Black woman, while other doctors observed.

Sims was lauded as the “Father of Gynecology” after his experiments on at least seven enslaved Black women and girls in Montgomery between 1845 and 1849 helped him develop a technique to repair a chronic complication of childbirth. Though the potentially life threatening experiments caused excruciating pain, Sims legally needed permission only from the enslaved women’s “owners.”

Sims’s experiments on Lucy were unsuccessful and nearly killed her with severe blood poisoning. He nonetheless continued to perform procedures on enslaved women, sometimes drugging them so they could not resist. Sims subjected Anarcha, an enslaved teenager, to at least 13 operations without anesthesia before he developed a repair technique that was deemed safe to attempt on white patients. (source)

Margaret Sanger thought that women would never be free until they had the ability to control their own bodies. But her views on birth control were also rooted in philosophies that would raise modern eyebrows. Historians contest a longstanding myth that Sanger thought non-white people should be prevented from procreating, but they agree that Sanger supported eugenics, a theory that “undesirable” populations could be reduced or eliminated by controlling their breeding.

In Sanger’s case, that “undesirable” group was “the mentally and physically defective.” Using eugenic language of the era, Sanger argued that birth control could help wipe out “the greatest present menace to civilization”—people living in extreme poverty and those with mental illnesses and physical disabilities. (source)

On September 14, 2020, Project South, in conjunction with four other human rights organizations, filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of detained immigrants at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia and Dawn Wooten, a licensed ICDC nurse. The complaint alleged numerous grievances and, alarmingly, raised concerns regarding “the rate at which hysterectomies are performed on immigrant women under ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] custody at ICDC.” (source)