Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, modern, reproduction
Abstract
Most historians of coerced sterilization in the United States have accentuated the awfulness of sterilization abuse by stressing the normality of the individuals sterilized. Carrie Buck, the poor white woman whose 1927 sterilization was upheld by the Supreme Court, became pregnant as a result of rape. Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, the Alabama girls whose 1973 lawsuit ushered in a new era of federal regulations, were singled out because they were poor and black. The issue of disability – the alleged feeblemindedness of Carrie Buck and the fact that the Relf sisters, like many poor southern blacks, were labeled mentally retarded -- is dismissed as an artifact of a classist and racist society or simply ignored. Yet in the 1970s, the sterilization of women and girls considered to have intellectual disabilities was the subject of quite a few lawsuits and a spirited debate. This deliberately provocative paper uses Relf and two high-profile court cases involving white teenagers -- Stump v. Sparkman (1978) and In the Matter of Lee Ann Grady (1981) --to bring disability into feminist historical analysis of coerced sterilization and reproductive rights. It is both a call for more analysis of the problematic concept of mental retardation, which was often used to justify involuntary sterilization, and a plea for the inclusion of persons with intellectual disabilities in feminist histories of reproductive rights
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Sterilizing the “Retarded” : Feminism, the Courts, and Historical Memory
Most historians of coerced sterilization in the United States have accentuated the awfulness of sterilization abuse by stressing the normality of the individuals sterilized. Carrie Buck, the poor white woman whose 1927 sterilization was upheld by the Supreme Court, became pregnant as a result of rape. Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, the Alabama girls whose 1973 lawsuit ushered in a new era of federal regulations, were singled out because they were poor and black. The issue of disability – the alleged feeblemindedness of Carrie Buck and the fact that the Relf sisters, like many poor southern blacks, were labeled mentally retarded -- is dismissed as an artifact of a classist and racist society or simply ignored. Yet in the 1970s, the sterilization of women and girls considered to have intellectual disabilities was the subject of quite a few lawsuits and a spirited debate. This deliberately provocative paper uses Relf and two high-profile court cases involving white teenagers -- Stump v. Sparkman (1978) and In the Matter of Lee Ann Grady (1981) --to bring disability into feminist historical analysis of coerced sterilization and reproductive rights. It is both a call for more analysis of the problematic concept of mental retardation, which was often used to justify involuntary sterilization, and a plea for the inclusion of persons with intellectual disabilities in feminist histories of reproductive rights