With forced hysterectomies of immigrant refugees in the news, Native Americans remember. Between 1970 and 1976, as the forced boarding schools were declining, physicians of the Indian Health Service sterilized at least a quarter of Native American women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, usually without their consent. While white women give birth to an average of just over two children, the average number of children born to a Native American woman dropped from 3.3 to 1.3 during the 1970s. The white doctors especially targeted full blood women. For the Kaw, every full blood woman was sterilized.

Blacks, of course, have similar stories.

The United Nations definition of genocide has five points. This is the fourth, from Article II (d): “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The stories emanating from ICE detainment camps bring back memories from the 1970s.

In a back room at an Indian Health Service facility in New Mexico, a young woman in the haze of labor signed a consent form which she believed was for painkillers.

Another woman had just had a Caesarean section; she was handed a piece of paper and a pen.

In Oklahoma, a woman signed under threat of having her children removed by protective services.

In Pennsylvania, a woman had her children removed the day before, and was trying to get them back.

In Montana two girls, aged fifteen, went in for appendectomies. All of these women woke up the next day and learned they have been sterilized.

There are many more such stories. The hospital files provided the medical rationale: socio-economic reasons.