I attended a national Native American health conference recently and heard a startling statistic. A speaker showed a slide that read something like, “40 percent of Native American women accessing care through the U.S. Indian Health Service in the 1970s were sterilized against their will.” I looked this up on the Web and found this statement on a lot of sites: “In 1975 alone, some 25,000 Native American women were permanently sterilized–many after being coerced, misinformed, or threatened.” Wouldn’t the Native American population have drastically decreased since the 70s if this were the case?
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Not necessarily. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 41 percent of U.S. women of childbearing age (or their partners) had been surgically sterilized as of 1995. “Surgical sterilization has grown to be the most common method of contraception among women of reproductive age in the United States,” the NCHS says. I mention these facts to put claims about Native American sterilization in perspective. They may be greatly exaggerated but they’re not completely insane.
While sterilization on that scale wouldn’t necessarily have caused the population to plummet, wouldn’t it have slowed things down? Today there are 2.5 million Native Americans, three times as many as in 1970–a much faster rate of increase than for the U.S. population as a whole. The more you look into it, in fact, the more unlikely a program of wholesale sterilization seems. Belief to the contrary can be attributed in large part to the efforts of one woman, Connie Redbird Uri Pinkerman, a Los Angeles doctor/lawyer/Native American activist.
All that having been said, fears of coercion weren’t just paranoia. HEW imposed relatively stringent regulations only because of a federal court order in 1974, issued after two poor black girls were involuntarily sterilized. The judge in that case noted that 100,000 to 150,000 poor women were being sterilized each year under federally funded programs. A fair number of them were Native Americans. Were some of them coerced? Possibly. All of them? No way. Many? I’m not buying it. Whatever Pinkerman may have thought, many activists opposed any attempt to limit the Native American population, even if it was the woman’s own choice.
