Several Los Angeles City Council members Tuesday introduced a resolution in support of an Assembly bill that would create a program to compensate survivors of state-sponsored sterilizations that occurred between 1909 and 1979 and to survivors of coercive sterilizations on prisoners after 1979.
AB 1007, introduced by Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, D-Boyle Heights, would create the Forced or Involuntary Sterilization Compensation Program to compensate victims of the state’s eugenics laws.
Between 1909 and 1979, more than 20,000 Californians were sterilized, according to the resolution, which was introduced by Council President Nury Martinez, Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Councilwomen Nithya Raman and Monica Rodriguez.
The bill would create a fund to compensate victims, including 144 women identified by a 2014 state audit as having been forcibly or unknowingly sterilized by the state, according to Carrillo. Those women were sterilized without proper authorization or consent between fiscal year 2005-06 and 2012-13, according to the audit.
The state’s eugenics laws targeted people with mental illness, which was thought to be transmitted to descendants, according to the resolution. Medical superintendents in state homes and hospitals were authorized to perform forced vasectomies on men and remove women’s fallopian tubes.
“The state maintained 12 state homes and hospitals, with very little oversight, that housed thousands of patients that were committed without proper consent during an era when reformers believed that sterilization was an important instrument of public health protection that would reduce the number of ‘defectives’ in society, result in cost savings for welfare programs and only allow `fit’ people to become parents,” the resolution reads.
The resolution adds that the law didn’t specifically target certain groups, but racial and ethnic minorities, women, low-income people and people with perceived disabilities were disproportionately labeled as having “mental deficiencies” and “feeblemindedness.”
In Los Angeles, at least 240 women, most of whom were of Mexican origin, were involuntarily sterilized after delivering babies at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center between 1965 and 1975, the resolution states. The eugenics laws were repealed in 1979, but forced sterilization continued for some prisoners, such as the 144 women discovered by the state audit.