A Brief History of California’s Eugenics Program (1909-2013)

It is a commonsense view that government spending is generally inefficient compared to spending by private people and businesses. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously argued, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”

This point about economic efficiency may be true, but it often lets government officials off the hook far too easy. A chilling example of this is how California is currently dealing with its long history of forcing sterilization on unwilling victims and then legislatively immunizing themselves from responsibility.

If you were a taxpayer in the Golden State as recently as 2010, your earnings probably helped fund the forced sterilizations of hundreds of inmates such as the Native American woman Moonlight Pulido.

“While in prison in 2005, Pulido said a doctor told her he needed to remove two ‘growths’ that could be cancer,” the Associated Press reported earlier this month. “She signed a form and had surgery. Later, something didn’t feel right. She was constantly sweating and not feeling like herself. She asked a nurse, who told her she had had a full hysterectomy, a procedure that removes the uterus and the cervix, and sometimes other parts of the reproductive system.”

“I felt like less than a woman,” Pulido told reporter Adam Beam. “We’re the only life-givers, we’re the only ones that can give life and he stole that blessing from me.”

Pulido was not alone. Other victims of this ghoulish policy shared stories with media, including Kimberly Jeffrey, who recalled resisting a tubal ligation procedure while she was sedated and strapped to an operating table.

“Being treated like I was less than human produced in me a despair,” Jeffrey told NPR.

Kelli Dillon, a former inmate at Central California women’s facility, explained how she found out that her ovaries had been removed in 2001 without her knowledge or consent after she was told surgeons were going to take a biopsy and remove a cyst.

“It was like my life wasn’t worth anything. Somebody felt I had nothing to contribute to the point where they had to find this sneaky and diabolical way to take my ability to have children,” Dillon told the Guardian in 2021.

It was not until years later, while still a member of the California State prison system, that Dillon began to realize other inmates were receiving hysterectomies and sterilization procedures without their knowledge, often after being told the procedures “were necessary to look for cancers or correcting gynecological issues.”

If the perpetrators of these violations were held accountable for their actions, such atrocities would be less likely to happen. But instead of being brought to justice for their malfeasance, the California State government is forcing innocent people to pay the price and getting off virtually scott free themselves. It is this sort of application for the expropriation of funds from private and productive citizens that has allowed governments to terrorize their citizens since time immemorial—a pattern that will have no reason to end until measures have been taken to eliminate the power of governments to enact such cruel legislation.

Timeline: California’s Forced Sterilization

1909: The state government of California created a sterilization program that became the largest eugenics movement in the United States, sterilizing more than 20,000 unwilling victims and also inspiring eugenics practices in Nazi Germany. The practices were carried out in public hospitals and other tax-funded institutions for the disabled and mentally ill, because people with disabilities or mental illnesses were deemed unfit for reproduction.

1927: By now the eugenics movement had become mainstream in the United States. It was widely thought among elite American policymakers that the human population could be improved by coercively preventing the reproduction of disliked demographics such as the disabled, the poor, the “feebleminded,” and even people deemed “sexual deviants” such as rapists, prostitutes, or even women who had sex out of wedlock. California’s constitutional right to continue its eugenics practices was enshrined by the United States Supreme Court in the Buck v. Bell case, in which the right of the state of Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck (who the state falsely declared “feebleminded”) against her will was upheld—and with it the rights of other state governments to make similar decisions for their inhabitants.

Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (considered an idol of “progressivism” in his time and still by some today) stated, “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.”

And thus, he concluded in a famous line that, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

1968-1974: Although the eugenics movement had peaked in the 1930s, California government officials oversaw continued tax-funded sterilizations into the later half of the 20th century. For example, according to an official document released by Los Angeles County five years ago apologizing for a series of sterilizations county officials had overseen between 1968 and 1974, “Over 200 women who delivered babies at the Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, the majority of whom were low income and born in Mexico, were possibly coerced into getting postpartum tubal ligations. At least some of the women were not aware they had been sterilized, and only learned that they had lost their reproductive rights during subsequent doctors’ visits. It is significant and necessary to acknowledge the irreparable harm inflicted onto the women who were subjected to these coerced sterilizations at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, and to their families.“

1979: California’s eugenics laws were repealed, supposedly ending the practice of state-funded eugenics in CA.

1999 – 2010: California’s eugenics movement was mysteriously revived, but this time under the guise of prison healthcare. According to the Associated Press less than two years ago, “Sterilizations in California prisons appear to date to 1999, when the state changed its policy for unknown reasons to include a sterilization procedure known as “tubal ligation” as part of inmates’ medical care. Over the next decade, women reported they were coerced into this procedure, with some not fully understanding the ramifications.”

2003: While the California government was still funding involuntary sterilizations in their state prisons, California Governor Gray Davis apologized on behalf of “the people of California” for the government’s “past” eugenicist actions. “To the victims and their families of this past injustice, the people of California are deeply sorry for the suffering you endured over the years,” the apology read. “Our hearts are heavy for the pain caused by eugenics. It was a sad and regrettable chapter in the state’s history, and it is one that must never be repeated again.”

2013: The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR, now Reveal) discovered that between 1997 and 2010 California state officials spent at least $147,460 of taxpayer funds to sterilize 148 female inmates. The above-quoted Moonlight Pulido, Kimberly Jeffrey, and Kelli Dillon were just three among them. Many of the records of these sterilizations were “lost or destroyed,” the Associated Press reports. NPR notes that the true number of illicit sterilizations during that period may have been significantly higher than reported, and that the operations appeared to disproportionately target repeat offenders.

The CIR’s claims were denied by the few state officials who commented in this early phase of the scandal. Valley State Prison’s former OB-GYN Dr. James Heinrich claimed that all sterilized inmates had consented to the operations. He even justified this use of tax dollars in a way that seemed to echo Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s disregard for the value of human life back in 1927. “Over a 10-year period, [$147,460] isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more,” Heinrich said according to NPR.

2014: Prompted by the CIR’s findings, auditors conducted their own investigation to confirm or disconfirm the CIR’s claims. “A state audit found 144 women were sterilized between 2005 and 2013…