9/15/20

By Josh Rubin

This morning many of us are trying to come to grips with the news out of an ICE prison for migrants in southern Georgia. A nurse working there seems to have run afoul of the privately run prison’s administration over health practices. She tells of neglect and cruelty in the handling of the COVID-19 scourge. This part leaves us sad but unsurprised.

But her complaint includes a charge that shakes us with the force of epiphany. That women in that prison, in strangely high numbers, have been having their wombs removed surgically by a doctor contracted by that prison administration.

We should have known. Forced sterilization of “undesirables” is as American as apple pie. The American philosophical foundations of eugenics passed the scalpel to the Nazis. It is a practice here that we last heard from as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, particularly wielded against indigenous people and Latinas.

And now through the smoke and disease and cruelty of a country writhing with despair, a news story brings to me, to some of us, with a breathless clarity, just who we are, and the throughlines of our evil.