by NILMINI GUNARATNE RUBIN
According to historian Mark Largent, more than 63,000 people were forcibly sterilized under eugenics-inspired official programs in 30 states between 1907 and 1980. ILLUSTRATION/Daniel Zender/The Times
My mom’s first day of motherhood was one of the happiest of her life. It was also one of the worst.
She had accompanied my dad from Sri Lanka to Washington State University in 1968, so he could complete his doctorate as a Fulbright Scholar. The school was in Pullman, a small town near the Idaho border. Fluent in English, she worked as a university librarian.
During her pregnancy, at age 30, she received care from one of Pullman’s few obstetricians. She endured labor without drugs, and I was born healthy in 1972. Because fathers weren’t allowed in the maternity ward overnight, my dad went back to their apartment when I was a few hours old.
As soon as he left, the doctor cut out my mom’s uterus.
He didn’t ask permission to perform the hysterectomy. In fact, he ignored her pleas. “There are too many colored babies already,” he told her. Exhausted from labor, my mom was too weak to resist as she was wheeled into the operating room and put under anesthesia. On her medical record, the doctor wrote “exploratory” as the reason for the operation. The real reason, of course, was eugenics, the racist pseudoscience of human breeding.
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The word “eugenics” was coined in 1883 by a British scientist, Francis Galton, who was Charles Darwin’s half-cousin. In the U.S. the movement was championed by wealthy elites like John Harvey Kellogg, doctor, corn flakes magnate and creator of the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Mich. The Nazis relied on eugenics research financed by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Los Angeles Times for more
(Thanks to reader)