This past week, social media has been flooded by claims that women have been forced to undergo the removal of their uterus in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Ocilla, Georgia. Dawn Wooten, an employee at Irwin County Detention Center, revealed that the detention centers were conducting unsafe medical procedures, such as hysterectomies, which are a surgical procedure to remove a woman’s uterus. Detainees are also not being tested for COVID-19, even if they’ve shown symptoms.
Women who got this procedure done did not consent to the surgery. Reportedly, they were being checked for heavy menstruation and weren’t even aware as to why they got the surgery in the first place.
According to an article from the Associated Press, “Mileidy Cardentey Fernandez unbuttoned her jail jumpsuit to show the scars on her abdomen. There were three small, circular marks. The 39-year-old woman from Cuba was told only that she would undergo an operation to treat her ovarian cysts.” But, a month later, Fernandez was still not sure what procedure she got. Fernandez’s medical records show information about her ovarian cysts but nothing of the surgery performed on her.
Wooten names Mahendra Amin as the surgeon performing these hysterectomies, even referring to him as the “uterus collector.” Dr. Mahendra Amin is a OB-GYN from Georgia, who according to complaints, performed five hysterectomy procedures around October to December of 2019. Business Insider also reported that Dr. Amin is not certified to practice these procedures by the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
The Associated Press article also mentions “Pauline Binam, a 30-year-old woman who was brought to the U.S. from Cameroon when she was 2…[she] saw Amin after experiencing an irregular menstrual cycle and was told to have a [dilation and curettage]…[Binam] was told Amin had removed one of her two fallopian tubes, which connect the uterus to the ovaries and are necessary to conceive a child.” Binam had not given consent to this procedure beforehand.
Historically, this isn’t the first time this has happened in the United States. Another article from CNN states that in 1907, after Indiana had passed the world’s first eugenics law, “About 60,000 people were sterilized in procedures that we would qualify today as being compulsory, forced, involuntary, and under the justifications that the people who were being sterilized were unfit to reproduce,” said Alexandra Minna Stern, a professor and associate dean at the University of Michigan.
In a publication from the World Health Organization, forced sterilization, like a hysterectomy that’s conducted without a patient’s consent, is a violation of fundamental human rights, “Including the right to health, the right to information, the right to privacy, the right to decide on the number and spacing of children, the right to found a family, and the right to be free from discrimination.” According to the statement, sterilization shouldn’t be subject to a government’s arbitrary requirements. The WHO argues that governments should protect people from such acts which extend into the private sphere, “Including where such practices are committed by private individuals, such as health-care professionals.” They state that these forced hysterectomies are a form of discrimination and violence against women.
Although ICE Acting Director Tony Pham claimed, “It is [his] commitment to make the corrections necessary to ensure we continue to prioritize the health, welfare and safety of ICE detainees,” there will still be an investigation into these allegations. Women’s wellbeing and consent continues to be ignored especially in places where there’s lack of oversight and lax regulation in favor of eugenics and systematically racist procedures.
