Doctors under contract with the California prison system sterilized 148 female inmates without required state authorization between 2006 and 2010, according to a bombshell story by the Sacramento Bee and the Center for Investigative Reporting. As many as 100 others were sterilized in procedures that date back to the late 1990s. Forced sterilizations of prisoners and the mentally ill used to be common in California, until state lawmakers banned the practice in 1979. Today, in order to ensure that all sterilizations are truly voluntary, doctors must get regulatory approval before performing the surgery. Records obtained by the CIR show that the rule was ignored for years. 

The prisoners were sterilized when they came to prison infirmaries in Corona or Chowchilla to give birth. Prison officials insist that the women consented to tubal ligations, but some inmates say they felt pressured to have the surgery. 

Yet Kimberly Jeffrey says she was pressured by a doctor while sedated and strapped to a surgical table for a C-section in 2010, during a stint at Valley State. She had failed a drug test while out on parole for a previous series of thefts.

Jeffrey, 43, was horrified, she said, and resisted.

“He said, ‘So we’re going to be doing this tubal ligation, right?’ ” Jeffrey said. “I’m like, ‘Tubal ligation? What are you talking about? I don’t want any procedure. I just want to have my baby.’ I went into a straight panic.” [SacBee]

An inmate who worked in the prison infirmary said she often heard staff urging women who had served multiple prison terms to get sterilized. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s not right,’ ” she told a reporter. “Do they think they’re animals, and they don’t want them to breed anymore?”

[Photo credit: Derekskey, Creative Commons.]