‘Undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs’ may not sound like a tremendously influential position but, with its prominent contributions to the representation of US foreign policy around the world, it can have quite an impact. There has therefore been considerable concern about the behaviour of its present (though not yet fully confirmed) incumbent, Darren Beattie, in repeatedly calling for sections of the country’s population to be sterilised. This apparent commitment to an extreme right-wing idea is the more concerning because the US has, in fact, sterilised large numbers of its residents without their full and informed consent in the past.
For people who have been paying attention to the escalating rhetoric of the new US regime, this talk of eugenics is unlikely to come as a surprise. Since 2015, when Donald Trump entertained supporters at a rally by doing a mocking impression of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, it has been clear that he has a dismissive, if not openly hostile, attitude towards disabled people.
Trump’s funding freeze devastates society’s most vulnerable
The freeze he put on federal funding immediately after taking office – which is currently suspended due to judicial intervention but may not remain that way – had a devastating impact on disabled people in need of Medicaid, personal care, support in education and more. It was officially introduced to allow for a review that would determine whether individual programmes aligned with Trump’s priorities, but vulnerable people who need help day to day cannot survive over the months it may take for that process to be carried out.
RFK Jr calls for mentally ill people to be sent to ‘wellness farms’
There is particular concern among people with mental illness, as new Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has repeatedly attacked the use of widely approved, effective treatments like SSRIs, saying that instead people should be sent to rehabilitation farms for as long as four years, or until they spontaneously recover. This recalls a bleak history.
The US first began sterilising people with mental illness – requiring neither their consent nor that of their next of kin – in Pennsylvania in 1905, and in 1927 this was formally ruled to be in accordance with the constitution. Although never actually banned, it decreased dramatically after 1978, when new regulations ruled that consent was in fact necessary, and made it difficult to get away with. Subsequent compensation cases also acted as a deterrent to individuals and institutions to actually carry out the procedure.
Mass sterilisation and race
There was a racial aspect to this, with Indigenous women and African Americans far more likely to be diagnosed as mentally ill and then sterilised on that pretext. They were also subjected to more direct sterilisation campaigns, which have been compared to genocide, with at least a quarter of Native American women (and some men) sterilised in the 1970s with dubious regard to consent, often when in hospital for other reasons. This happened at the same time that Native children were being forcibly taken from their families and adopted out to white families (where they were often abused to used as sources of free labour), or kept in institutions where forcible religious conversion was the norm and abuse was rife.
The sterilisation of Black women occurred all across the country, at three times the rate for white women, but was most common in the South, where it so often hinged on false medical pretexts that it came to be known as having a Mississippi appendectomy. Hispanic women, meanwhile, frequently found themselves coerced into it after giving birth, when hospital staff falsely told them that they would be ineligible for state support if they had more children and found themselves without an income. Sterilisation was often presented to both these groups as the only contraceptive option, even after the pill became available.
Other groups at risk of coerced sterilisation
Deaf people, physically disabled people and neurodivergent people have also faced a historically high risk of being coerced into getting sterilised, while in other cases, especially prior to 1978, it was justified purely on the basis that people were poor. Single mothers were a particular target, seen as immoral and socially irresponsible. This frequently included women and girls who had become pregnant as a result of rape or incest.
The sterilisation of prisoners and detainees
Any potential safeguards were not applied with anything like the same efficacy to prisoners, who, compared with other vulnerable groups, have always struggled to find people who will advocate on their behalf. During the period when sterilisation was most common, California was by far the worst offender, carrying out the procedure on around 20,000 people. After the 1978 ruling the practice declined but did not stop, with the notion of consent becoming blurry when prisoners were reportedly subjected to pressure from prison staff. The state outlawed it – unless medically essential – in 2014 – but it continues to happen in other states.
There is also evidence of it happening in ICE detention centres, where immigrants say they were coerced into agreeing to procedures which, due to the language barrier, they did not fully understand.
Beattie has described those he wishes to see sterilised as “lower quality humans”, arguing that their existence is subsidised by “higher quality humans” (it is, of course, significantly easier for those with social advantages to get higher paying jobs). He has also talked about the ‘need’ to sterilise “feral populations”. If this sounds like the sort of language that the Nazis used before moving on to their ‘final solution’, it’s worth bearing in mind that Adolf Hitler himself said that his interest in eugenics came from observing the US.
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