UC Lecture- Kluchin: Forced Sterilization in the US

Professor Rebecca Kluchin will deliver the following Taft Center co-sponsored lecture: "Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in Modern America." This talk will examine forced sterilization in the United States decades after the formal eugenics movement dissolved and discuss ways in which victims and their advocates worked to end this practice.

In 1973, the parents of two young Alabama girls coercively sterilized by a federally funded family planning program publicly protested their daughters' victimization. Their actions brought sterilization abuse to the attention of the American public. Responding to news that thousands of women were being coercively sterilized in medical facilities that received government funds, activists organized to end the practice while legislators at the local, state, and federal levels held hearings and debated policies aimed at eliminating conditions that nurtured this abuse.

Rebecca Kluchin is associate professor of history at California State University, Sacramento, and the author of Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950-1980.