Inside the hidden campaign to forcibly sterilize thousands of inmates in California women’s prisons

• Between 1997 and 2014, over 1,000 women were forcibly sterilized in California prisons, most of them Black.
• "Belly of the Beast," a documentary that examines the hidden campaign, made its television debut on Monday night on PBS.
• The film's director Erika Cohn follows survivor Kelli Dillon, who was sterilized at 24. Dillon and lawyer-advocate Cynthia Chandler worked together to pass a bill banning these procedures in California prisons.
• Women inmates were falsely told they had cervical cancer and needed their reproductive organs removed, or doctors performed non-consensual hysterectomies after they gave birth, "Belly of the Beast" shows.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Kelly Dillon was 24 when she was sterilized without her consent.

It was 2008, and she had just arrived in Central California Women's Facility, a prison where she would spend the next 15 years after being charged with shooting and killing her husband in self-defense.

A survivor of domestic violence, Dillon left her two young sons behind at her home in Los Angeles. But she did have hope that, following her prison sentence, she could find love, get pregnant, and raise a child like she'd dreamed.

But that all came crashing down when she told prison doctors she had bad cramps, and they said they would need a hysterectomy to treat cervical cancer. When she stopped getting her period, Dillon learned from another doctor she never had cancer, she had in fact been sterilized against her will, and she couldn't become pregnant again.

She was not alone — the California prison system forcibly sterilized 1,400 women inmates, most of them Black, between 1997 and 2003. It is not clear how many endured the same fate in the 11 years between 2003 and 2014, when Dillon and her attorney Cynthia Chandler worked to pass SB1135, a bill that bans forced sterilizations in prisons for birth control purposes.

Court documents revealed that the prisons coded cases like Dillon's, as well as those of tubal ligation's after C-section births, as "medically necessary," and, as such, the state would pay for them. Another document showed Dr. James Heinrich, the OB/GYN who performed these sterilizations (including Dillon's), called them "cheaper than welfare." 

Forced sterilizations have been performed, uncovered, and stamped out in the US for decades, yet the practice endures and is still protected by a 1927 Supreme Court ruling.

It is a perpetual fight that has roots in racism and outdated laws, according to Erika Cohn, director and executive producer of the documentary "Belly of the Beast," which aired on PBS last night and is now available to stream for free on the PBS app.

'It screamed eugenics'

Cohn first learned doctors had been performing non-consensual, irreversible surgery on inmates in California when she met attorney Cynthia Chandler through mutual friends in 2010. Chandler runs Justice Now, an Oakland organization that champions for compassionate release of women and queer people in the prison system.

As a woman of Jewish descent, the issue felt personal for Cohn.

"To me, that really screamed eugenics. As a Jewish woman, the phrase 'Never again' was always kind of profoundly in the back of my mind," Cohn told Insider, referring to the post-Holocaust adage. "When I learned about this different kind of genocide that was happening through imprisonment, that was happening through forced sterilizations behind bars, I knew that I wanted to get involved."

Belly of the Beast

The US has a long history of forced sterilization

This isn't the first instance of mass forced sterilizations in the US.

Since 1927, the Supreme Court has chosen to uphold the case Buck v. Bell, which allowed Virginia officials to forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck, a young woman they called "feeble-minded" and decided was unfit to start a family.

Supporters of the eugenics movement — which upheld selective mating as a way to "improve" society and led to the sterilization of people with disabilities, Native Americans, Black people, and Latinx people — considered the SCOTUS ruling a victory, NPR previously reported. The Nazis modeled their plan for genocide on California's sterilization of tens of thousands of people, as 29 other states followed suit.

Between 1920 and 1950, California's government oversaw the sterilizations of 20,000 people, citing a lack of mental stability or physical disability as the reason for the irreversible procedure. A 1965 survey found one-third of Puerto Rican women were sterilized under the guidance of the US and Puerto Rican governments.

The government's right to sterilize people they see unfit for procreation is still in some states' constitutions.

In September, forced sterilizations were uncovered at a Georgia immigration detention center. Officials there denied the allegations, and the doctor who performed the procedures was not disciplined or fined, the Associated Press found in their investigation.

In California, women were falsely told they had cancer and needed sterilizations to survive

Cohn said that, through documentation and interviews, she learned many women in the California prisons were not told they were being sterilized until they came out of surgery.

In some cases, women reported prison medical staff telling them they had cervical cancer and needed their reproductive organs removed to survive.

In others, doctors performed hysterectomies, a surgery to remove the uterus, immediately after a woman inmate gave birth, women told Cohn. 

"There's layers upon layers upon layers of how these procedures happen. And the one thing that remains consistent is that these are coercive illegal sterilizations," Cohn said.

'We're seen as burdens on the system'

Despite SB1135 banning forced sterilizations, Cohn said heightened security has made it difficult for advocates to know whether California prisons have gone away with the practice. Medical personnel who were involved in the sterilizations weren't reprimanded, according to the film.

The film posits that some believe prison inmates don't deserve to be in charge of their own fertility. It's a myth, Cohn says, that's perpetuated by the legacy of racism in the United States.

"That is one of the things that has happened to the African American Black woman: We're seen as welfare recipients. And we're seen as burdens on the system," Dillon, now 44, told The 19th.

"If you can perpetuate that lie, and perpetuate those issues, then it's easier to get not only the buy in for the agenda and the policy to sterilize us, but you can also get the person who thinks they have a moral high standard of preserving life … you can get them to buy into that b——t too."

Cohn said people who want to repair the country's legacy of forced sterilizations should demand states ban it, and offer monetary reparations to those who have undergone the procedure while in prison. North Carolina and Virginia have already passed laws that do this, and Cohn said signing a petition could get California there too.

"It's important to understand how pervasive and how systemic these issues are and how they will continue to be that way, unless there's accountability for what's happening," said Cohn.

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