Boston Children's Hospital - Forced Sterilization
As outrage against Boston Children's Hospital and its "gender-affirming" surgeries mounts, America's history of forced sterilization comes out of the woodwork
Boston Children’s Hospital has recently come under fire for their self-published viral videos detailing various procedures available to “transgender patients,” such as phalloplasty and vaginoplasty surgeries. The hospital’s website stated that these services were available to patients aged 17 to 35 prior to the online backlash, but has since modified their statement, claiming that no minors are eligible for these services.
Amidst the outrage, many critics of the hospital are remarking that these procedures, aside from being incredibly invasive and medically unnecessary, are in fact having detrimental health effects on the patients receiving this care. For example, cervical and vaginal atrophy has been very commonly cited by females on testosterone treatment; this observation is backed by the Mayo Clinic, which states on their information page for testosterone therapy that the effects of these treatments may even be permanent in some cases. Prior to the Boston Children’s Hospital scandal, advocates against “gender-affirming healthcare” have also cited the long-term use of Lupron, a drug which has typically been used for male prostate cancer patients, as well as for the sterilization of sexual predators, which is currently being prescribed to minors as puberty blockers. Many claim that patients who have been prescribed this drug and others like it are unwittingly being sterilized themselves (a claim backed once again by the Mayo Clinic), and that is to say nothing of the many other health risks. But, while the reckless sterilization of gender-dysphoric patients is certainly far more drastic than it has been in recent years, forced sterilization in America is far from a new practice.
Within the United States, forced sterilization is a platform held by many progressivist pundits. Individuals such as Al Gore and Bill Gates have advocated for such practices as a solution to a supposed overpopulation problem. For other well-known examples, we need look no further than to Planned Parenthood’s founder and the mother of modern eugenics, Margaret Sanger. Some have condemned Sanger based on her writings, which frequently compared African-Americans to “weeds” and called for the sterilization of mentally and physically “unfit” individuals. In her own time, these atrocious statements gained her a federal indictment for violation of postal obscenity laws; it’s lamentable, to say the least, that such a distasteful view of Sanger has become largely outdated.
President Woodrow Wilson is believed by some to have had correspondences with Sanger, which is little surprise given his own views on segregation and eugenics. In 1911, during his tenure as governor of New Jersey, Wilson codified a proposed piece of legislation that permitted the forcible sterilization of criminals and mental defectives, who would certainly match Sanger’s “unfit” designation. In 1915, Wilson hosted the very first screening of a film at the White House, “The Birth of A Nation,” a fictional KKK-propaganda film. “The Birth of A Nation” is set in an alternate Reconstruction (post-Civil War) era where freed slaves were portrayed as disgruntled, unruly, and belligerent, antagonizing and assaulting their white neighbors until they are eventually subjugated by the Ku Klux Klan. The film, originally titled “The Clansman,” was adapted from the novel written by Thomas Dixon, Jr., an old college friend of Wilson’s.
Dixon, Jr. was not alone among Wilson’s pro-segregation entourage; Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated Supreme Court Justice and Wilson correspondent, is one of the most celebrated decisionmakers in the history of the Supreme Court. Holmes’s progressivism, however, was often a driving force in his decisions. One case of his in particular, Buck v. Bell, is known for the determination that patients of a mental institution may be sterilized by force, lest their offspring continue to “sap the strength of the State,” Holmes wrote in his opinion. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he concluded callously.
The Buck v. Bell decision would have massive consequences for decades after the court’s determination in 1927. Roughly 70,000 U.S. citizens were forcibly sterilized in the aftermath of Buck v. Bell, many of them deaf, blind, or otherwise impaired in some way. To this day, sterilizations are still occurring in the 21st century under institutions such as ICE.
Yet, while these darker parts of history are becoming more and more widespread each year, the conclusions being drawn from them are troubling. An article written on the screening of “The Birth of A Nation” in the New Yorker very correctly condemns it as an awful event in our nation’s past and one that should not be repeated. However, the article draws the conclusion that President Donald Trump’s legal immigration enforcement policies are somehow comparable to the pro-segregation messaging in the film, and that his policies are reviving a deeply racist sentiment in modern-day America. Another piece, published to UC Berkeley’s Berkeley Political Review (which, by the way, describes itself very hilariously as “nonpartisan”), analyses the sterilizations that occurred covertly under ICE and implies that these injustices were unique to and instigated by the Trump administration, ultimately concluding that legal immigration enforcement is an inherently racist practice. Are these truly the most salient conclusions that can be drawn?
Of course not. Anyone who alleges that these injustices are strictly reminiscent of the modern-day GOP is woefully unaware of the history of eugenics in America. While Holmes was a Republican, Wilson was a registered Democrat and Sanger was a member of the Socialist party; these issues are not unique to any particular political platform. Immigration policy and forced sterilization are incomparable issues, and to say that legal immigration enforcement is akin to forced sterilization is an utterly false conclusion. Legal immigration enforcement is enacted by the State to protect civil liberties, while forced sterilization is an encroachment by the State upon civil liberties. In studying this tragic aspect of America’s history, drawing conclusions to bolster a political motive is catastrophically dangerous; using that flawed logic, one might be able to vindicate Boston Children’s Hospital by claiming that its opponents are attempting to erase and disenfranchise gender-dysphoric patients in the same way that Buck v. Bell erased and disenfranchised mental patients, when in fact BCH is only perpetuating the problem first caused by Buck v. Bell. We must be able to condemn the injustice objectively without tying it to any larger movement. If we do not, then we will be doomed to repeat that very same injustice.