#mary alice relf

[blondebrainpowered]

Minnie Lee Relf and Mary Alice Relf (who were 12 and 14 years old in 1973, respectively) are two African American sisters who were involuntarily sterilized by tubal ligation by a federally funded family planning clinic in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973.

[enilybenil]

Questions (Chapters 1 - 6)

What is up with Alice?

How is Malcolm going to get to senior school?

When did Marisa Coulter learn about the witches’ prophecy about Lyra (presumably within the last six months) and why is it now so important to her to resume custody? It’s not for Lyra’s personal care. We know how Lyra was treated when she lived with Mrs. Coulter. And how could Mrs. Coulter profit from having a prophetic (Philosophical!) child when the prophecy wouldn’t come to pass for another ten years or so? (Lyra raised by Mrs. Coulter would be an entirely different animal, not at all the Lyra Silvertongue of His Dark Materials. Fic?)

Why did the CCD kill Robert Luckhurst?

Who is trying to kill Lyra and why?

How did the witches’ prophecy become known?

Does Papadimitrou become the Master at Jordan who tries to assassinate Lord Asriel?

Why is Lord Asriel not just an unfit father, but an unfit person?

Comparisons between Hannah Relf and Mary M–

Does Hannah Relf become for Lyra after The Amber Spyglass what she became for Malcolm here? Was Malcolm her first student and Lyra one in his footsteps?

Does Malcolm appear at all in His Dark Materials, unnoticed?

[longliveblackness]

The Relf sisters, were 12 and 14-years-old.

The sisters had been declared mentally incompetent by an Alabama physician who subsequently went ahead and sterilized them using federal money to pay for the girls procedures.

The children's mother could not read and write and did not know what she was signing at the time. She was deceived into marking "x" (which was used for as a signature for blacks who could not read or write) on the consent forms. Nurses first approached Mrs. Relf to get permission to inject the girls with a contraceptive depo-provera (still in its experimental stages).

The injection request was based on the governments interest in controlling the black population, race, and families living and likely to remain in poverty. But, months before the nurses approached Mrs. Relf the government had already decided to end funding for the hormonal injections because of the carcinogenic effect it was having in lab animals.

A nurse arrived to pick the girls up at the Relf's home the day they supposedly were going to have their birth control injections. Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf were left alone in the hospital ward. A nurse went into the girl's room and had Minnie Lee sign a false document, indicating that she was over age twenty-one (she was in fact fourteen years old).

The next morning, both sisters were placed under an anesthetic and surgically sterilized. Matter of fact, on the same day the nurse picked up Minnie Lee and Mary Alice to take them to the clinic, she returned to the Relf home in attempt to pick up Katie, the oldest sister to also go to the hospital for sterilization. But, she locked herself in her room and refused to go.

When Mrs. Relf questioned the girls about the shots. Minnie Lee told her that they had surgery. Mrs. Relf later found out that instead of her two girls having contraceptive shots, they were permanently sterilized with government funding.

Something Mrs. Relf never wanted to happen to her girls. The Relfs later joined a class action lawsuit in federal court demanding a ban on the use of federal funds for sterilization.

They also sued the surgeons and other associated groups for 1,000,000 dollars.

•••

Las hermanas Relf tenían doce y catorce años.

Las hermanas habían sido declararas mentalmente incompetentes por un médico de Alabama, el cual después las esterilizó utilizando fondos federales para pagar por los procedimientos.

La madre de las niñas no podía leer ni escribir y no sabía qué es lo que estaba firmando para ese entonces. Fue engañada para marcar ‘x’ (era utilizado como firma para personas negras que no sabían leer o escribir) en los formularios de consentimiento. Las enfermeras primero se habían acercado a la señora Relf para obtener permiso para inyectar a las niñas con un anticonceptivo llamado depo-provera (el cual seguía en etapa experimental).

La solicitud de la inyección estaba basada en el interés que tenía el gobierno de controlar a la población negra, raza y familias que vivían y probablemente permanecerían en la pobreza. Pero meses antes de que las enfermeras se acercaran a la señora Relf, el gobierno ya había tomado la decisión de cortar los fondos para la inyección hormonal debido al efecto cancerígeno que estaba teniendo en los animales de los laboratorios.

Una enfermera llegó a recoger a las hermanas Relf el día que supuestamente estarían recibiendo sus inyecciones anticonceptivas. Minnie Lee y Mary Alice Relf fueron dejadas solas en la habitación del hospital. Una enfermera ingresó a la habitación e hizo que Minnie Lee firmara un documento indicando que ella era mayor de veintiún años (de hecho, ella tenía catorce años para este entonces).

La mañana siguiente las hermanas fueron anestesiadas y quirúrgicamente esterilizadas. De hecho, el mismo día que la enfermera recogió a Minnie Lee y Mary Alice para llevarlas a la clínica, ella regresó a la residencia de los Relf para intentar recoger a Katie (la hermana mayor), para llevarla al hospital también a ser esterilizada pero ella se encerró en la habitación y se rehusó a ir.

Cuando la señora Relf le hizo preguntas a las niñas acerca de las inyecciones, Minnie Lee le dijo que habían recibido cirugías. La señora Relf luego supo que en vez de que sus hijas recibieran inyecciones anticonceptivas, estas fueron permanentemente esterilizadas con fondos gubernamentales.

Esto es algo que la señora Relf no quería para sus niñas. La familia Relf luego se unió a una demanda colectiva en una corte federal, demandando que se prohibiera el uso de fondos federales para la esterilización.

También demandaron a los cirujanos y otros grupos asociados por la cantidad de un millón de dólares.

[mrars]

Forced Sterilization | The Relf Sisters

Image: Uncredited. The Relf Sisters. June 28, 1973. The Associated Press, Montgomery. 

In the 1960s-70s, “reports of coercive, involuntary, and otherwise nonconsenting sterilization” were brought to light (Volscho 17). This was due to the racist hierarchy that is present within the United States. The hierarchy had “‘whites’ on the top and people of color on the bottom” which mapped “on to an ordering of reproductive rights. In this order, European American women are least likely to have external authorities (e.g., the state, reproductive healthcare providers) constraining their reproductive abilities, while women of color are most likely to have such institutions influencing their reproductive lives” (19). There are many contributions as to why various institutions got involved in black women’s reproductive systems, but at least one contribution is the stereotypes that were/are associated with black women. Two of these stereotypes are the Jezebel and the Welfare Queen. The Jezebel stereotype is “of a sexually aggressive ‘black’ woman promoted by media during slavery to explain the high birth rates of bonded women and numerous allegations of sexual assault claimed by enslaved women” (20). The Welfare Queen stereotype “suggests that African American women have babies simply to enrich themselves with ‘welfare money’” (20). Overall, racism within society and the medical field led to many black women experiencing non-consensual and/or coercive sterilization.

There are two women, specifically, who have experienced forced sterilization and experimentation. These women are the Relf sisters. In 1973, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf were “the unwilling and unknowing recipients of tubal sterilization as well as guinea pigs for intrauterine devices and what were then experimental Depo-Provera shots” (17). According to their mother, she signed a consent form “after a nurse told her it was to gain her consent for ‘some shots’ her daughters needed. Mrs. Relf said she did not know that her daughters would be operated on” (”Sterilization”). It was also stated in a 1976 article that, “Officials of the Montgomery Community Action committee” admitted that the Relf sisters “had been receiving birth control shots at the clinic every ninety days. Caseworkers stated that these girls ‘were not bright enough to take birth control pills on schedule. Sterilization seemed the best alternative....’” (Tessler 59). 

These girls are only a couple out of many women of color to have experienced forced sterilization. It was also evident that when news of women of color receiving these sterilizations came to light, it was obvious “that poor and minority women [were] the targets of compulsory sterilization and that the operations have generally been done in programs funded by the government through the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the Agency for the International Development” (60). Also, according “to a National Fertility Study conducted in 1970s, 20 percent of married black women had been sterilized, almost three times the percentage of married white women” (60). While news of forced sterilization has been less frequent, it continues, and poor women of color still bear the brunt of this medical racism and classism. 

Works Cited:

“Sterilization Blamed on Nixon Regime.” Bay State Banner (1965-1979), July 26, 1973.

Tessler, Suzanne. “Compulsory Sterilization Practices.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 1, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 52-66.

Volscho, Thomas W. “Sterilization Racism and Pan-Ethnic Disparities of the Past Decade: The Continued Encroachment of Reproductive Rights.” Wicazo Sa Review 25, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 17-31. 

[erinptah]

The Secret Commonwealth review: It was...pretty underwhelming, mostly

Finally got the audiobook of The Secret Commonwealth checked out from my local library!

(Here’s my review of its predecessor, La Belle Sauvage, if you want to start there.)

It’s 20 hours long. Whoof.

As for the contents…look, it was well-written prose. I didn’t get bored while listening. (Rereading that last review, I realized I’d written the same thing about the previous book, too.) But in retrospect, there sure was not a lot that happened in those 20 hours. Some notable action bits, in between a lot of padding.

And my reactions mostly consist of…complaints. Not “this is hideous, time to ragequit the series, this is an unqualified anti-rec” complaints, more a low-level churn of frustration.

(There’s one scene I know has made someone else outright refuse to read it, though, and I think it’s totally reasonable. More on that later.)

So I’m gonna try to unpack a bunch of it here. Hopefully in enough detail that, if you haven’t read it yet (and don’t mind spoilers), it can help you make an informed decision about whether it’s worth spending 20 hours of your life on.

Spoilers start here!

The Story

We open with Lyra as a 20-year-old student at St. Sophia’s, a women’s college in Oxford. She’s made some kinda-friends, including former booty calls that she’s still on good terms with, but she’s badly estranged from Pantalaimon.

Their rift is exacerbated by a couple of books she’s read that are popular with young intellectuals lately. One is a philosophy book, one is a novel, both of them seem broadly Ayn Randian in the sense that “teens/college kids get really into these books and decide it’s smart and fashionable to adopt their moral framework, ignoring both the logical failures and the ways in which this turns you into a horrible person.”

She’s been staying at Jordan between semesters, but political drama forces her to move, and that’s when Oakley Street swoops in to make contact. They’re the secret Magisterum-thwarting spy organization that Hannah Relf worked for in La Belle Sauvage. Employees now include Alice Lonsdale and Malcolm Polstead, who fill Lyra in on the events of the previous book.

Lyra crashes at Malcolm’s parents’ inn for a bit, but her fighting with Pan gets so bad that he takes off, leaving a note. He’s going to confront one of the authors of the fashionable/terrible books — who lives in Germany, so this could take a while.

Since Lyra can’t just hang around and go through the motions of a normal life while her daemon is visibly missing, she takes off too. First on a detour to the Gyptians, then on a sorta meandering cross-continental journey of her own.

Along the way, both Lyra and Pan keep uncovering new details about this ongoing side plot:

It turns out there’s a place, I think somewhere in the Middle East, where daemons can’t go — same as the area in the North that witches use for separation ordeals. If a human crosses that area, they arrive at the growing-place of a type of rose that won’t grow properly anywhere else, whose oil has the same effect as the seed-pod sap used by Mary Malone in the mulefa world — you can use it to make a Dust-viewing lens.

This rose oil can also be used to make all kinds of super-cool products, like the World’s Best Perfume and the World’s Best Rosewater, so it’s valuable for lots of reasons. But a few researchers have caught on to the Dust-viewing power, and the Magisterium has caught on that some dangerous research is happening with roses, so they’ve started destroying every rosebush they can find in the general region — wreaking havoc with the global economy in the process.

(They’re also trying to convince the general population that God Says Roses Are Immoral now. If this book had come out 5 years ago, I could’ve made some great connections with “there’s widespread successful Magisterium propaganda about how nobody should like or respect the work of botanists.”)

And there’s a related plot where Lyra’s uncle (she actually has one! Mrs. Coulter had a brother!) is playing a long game to re-consolidate as much Magisterium power as possible under a single individual. It gets us some good dramatic sequences…which I feel no need to break down here, because they’re exactly the ones you would imagine, with exactly the outcome you’re already expecting.

One of Uncle Wannabe-Pope’s employees is Bonneville Junior, the son of the miniboss from La Belle Sauvage. He’s a trained alethiometrist, but is more interested in his personal vendetta against Lyra than his actual job. Takes after Dad in that he’s not very deep or complex, just a straightforward fun-to-hate villain.

Pan eventually makes his way to the Terrible Author’s home, where he discovers that things are weird and creepy, but not very specific. Doesn’t achieve anything in particular, either. Disheartened, he sets off for the Region of the Weird Roses, with the idea he’ll meet Lyra there.

Lyra, meanwhile, has a notebook they recovered from an explorer who went to the Region of the Weird Roses. It includes a list of other (non-witch) people across the world who’ve been separated, because apparently they’re more common than you’d think, and have a secret support network. So she visits a few of these people along her trip, with an endgame goal of Weird Roseville.

Malcolm also makes his own journey toward Weird Roseville. I think it was part of an Oakley Street investigation into “what does the Magisterium have against roses these days?” In the middle of it, Bonneville Junior confronts him (Junior is having trouble finding Lyra, but has a secondary vendetta against Malcolm for killing his dad, so this is almost as good). Malcolm talks him down.

At last Lyra, Pan, and Junior all hit the same “creepy deserted town in the general area of Weird Roseville.” But none of them manage to interact before the book ends.

…In my LBS review, I said it had serious middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome, a whole lot of setup for no payoff. TSC spends very little time following up on any of it. To be fair, the Original Trilogy has happened in the meantime and this book also tries to address some of the events from that, but the vast bulk of it is even more setup for no payoff.

Complaints, Broadly Organized By Theme, In Loosely Chronological Order

Lyra at St. Sophia’s:

I really like how the opening sequence involves Lyra noticing a friend is in distress and helping her out! (Friend’s dad is in the rose-using business, and his company is going under.) And then…that’s the last we see of any connections with female friends her own age. In the entire book.

One of the Terrible Rationalist Books is spreading the idea that “daemons are a collective hallucination.” This is not a “rational” idea in this world! It would be like saying that faces are a collective hallucination!

And Lyra is the least likely person in this world to buy into it, because she’s visited a world without visible daemons, and got empirical proof (via Will’s and John Parry’s separation ordeals) that even under those conditions, they still exist!

I can appreciate the idea of Lyra and Pan being traumatized and scarred and having trouble, but this, specifically, is a nonsensical thing for them to argue over.

The book also gestures (not very hard, thankfully) toward the idea that Lyra is doubting the existence of magic in general. Which, again, is the equivalent of someone from our world deciding it’s rational to doubt the existence of weather.

Also, it seems like Lyra/Pan haven’t had any contact with witch society through these years. Why not? If anyone’s going to have sympathy and understanding and support groups for their separation-related trauma, it’s the culture where every single member formally goes through the same thing! And I’m sure Serafina would be delighted to see them! But they don’t even consider the idea.

Lyra and Malcolm:

Yes, they’re being telegraphed as a future couple, and yes, it’s just as creepy and unappealing as the internet has been saying.

And, look, I’m not going to say “20-year-old Lyra is too young to date anyone she wants.” Not after we got through all of Original Flavor HDM without saying “12-year-old Lyra is too young to go on an interdimensional journey with no adult supervision and save the multiverse.”

But he was one of her teachers when she was 16, and his POV includes remembering how he had to actively shut down sexual interest in her then, and here in the present Lyra still thinks of him as kind of a distant authority figure, and that’s weird, okay?

They only have a couple days’ worth of actual interaction before being apart for the rest of the book. That’s not enough time to believably develop their dynamic into something believably-potentially-romantic. So the narrative doesn’t try.

…but it still has multiple people ask Malcolm if he’s in love with Lyra afterward.

The foreshadowing on Lyra’s side is all in how she keeps thinking about how similar he is to Will. (Cat daemon, killed someone when he was a tween, etc.) Because that’s what we all want for Lyra’s romantic future, a knockoff Will-substitute, amirite?

Separately: Malcolm and friends tell Lyra the whole backstory about the magical boat trip from La Belle Sauvage, but it doesn’t seem like she tells them anything about “that time I went on an interdimensional journey, built a group of allies from multiple worlds and species including literal angels, killed God, and permanently rewrote the nature of death.” I feel like that should’ve come up!

General daemon stuff:

There’s a moment in the early chapters when Pan, wandering alone at night, considers eating some small critter (the kind that an ordinary pine marten would eat). It’s not like he’s going through a species-identity crisis, either. It’s just written as…a thing a daemon might do. So that’s weird.

In the original series, daemon separation is a major, improbable ordeal. Under normal circumstances, a human and a daemon being dragged apart past their distance limit will just kill them. At Bolvangar they figured out a severance method that would leave you physically functional, but dead inside. Witch-style separation only happens at this special daemon-repelling place in the North (you don’t have to be a witch to use it, see John Parry, but they usually don’t tell non-witches it exists), or on the shores of the World of the Dead. So far, so good.

In this series, we find out that there’s another place on this Earth with the same daemon-repelling properties. It’s also remote and isolated and associated with Cool Weird Stuff (the cities in the Northern Lights vs. the Dust-revealing roses). Again, so far, so good.

…And then we find out that random people can just kinda do a separation ordeal anywhere. Okay, it already happened to Malcolm in La Belle Sauvage, but now it’s all over the place. Lyra keeps spotting people on the street without daemons! Pan teams up with a kid who got dragged apart from her daemon in a shipwreck, and it didn’t kill them! It’s too easy. It’s unsatisfying. It undercuts so much of the monumental feeling separation had in the original trilogy.

It also makes it even weirder that nobody was able to hook Lyra and Pan up with a support group. Oakley Street couldn’t suss it out? Her friends among the Gyptians couldn’t catch an underground rumor and pass it on?

Related: when we saw daemonless kids in The Golden Compass, they were treated like horror-movie monsters. Like zombies, ghosts, bodies walking around without heads. But when people clock Lyra as being daemonless here, they treat it like it’s something immoral. Like she’s walking around topless and needs to cover it up.

There’s just a general pattern of rewriting HDM’s established rules about daemons, and not for the better.

And speaking of rewriting established rules…general alethiometer stuff:

There is a New Method for reading the alethiometer. It involves pointing all three hands at the same symbol, which already seems like a gimmick, not a useful way to frame a question.

And somehow, that gets you the answers in the form of…magic visions. No intuition or interpretation needed! The sights and sounds just get funneled directly into your brain!

The reason this isn’t a Plot-Breaking Hack is because it makes the user super-queasy. You can only use it when you’re in a position to be sick afterward, and people would rather not use it at all.

Lyra spends most of the story with the alethiometer, and without all the symbology books that go with it. She avoids using the New Method because of the nausea, but she also avoids using the Classic Method, on the grounds that it apparently can’t get her anything without the books.

She’s been studying these books for years now! Couldn’t she at least try to read it, and make her best guess at the interpretation? Maybe sometimes she gets it right, maybe sometimes she’s wrong and things go sideways and she realizes in hindsight which of the symbols she misread, maybe sometimes she gives up and gets depressed and puts it away without drawing a conclusion at all…but nope, she just flat-out doesn’t interact with it.

Midway through the book, Lyra gets a tipoff about a kind of truth-reading cards. That’s fine; we know there are other methods of truth-reading in the multiverse, including the I Ching and Mary Malone’s computer. Makes sense as a new tidbit of worldbuilding.

But towards the end of the story, someone helpfully gifts Lyra a deck of the cards. And she spends some time trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the cards fit together. More time than she spends trying to infer answers from how the pretty pictures on the alethiometer fit together.

The alethiometer didn’t need a New Method or a total replacement in the narrative…but apparently it’s getting them.

And what was the point of Lyra dedicating herself to studying those symbols, for years, if she can get better and more-accurate data from a set of symbols she’d never seen before until this week?

Pan’s international voyage:

This all started when Pan got the idea that Terrible Author had “put a spell on Lyra and stolen her imagination.” Which sounds like a figure of speech at first, but no, apparently Pan thinks this guy is literally magic.

And yet, somehow, not magic enough to be dangerous, even for a single lone daemon whose only plan is “confront him directly and demand that he fix it”?

Most of the trip is uneventful, since it’s a long string of Pan successfully keeping out-of-sight.

There’s one clever part where, once he’s in Terrible Author’s hometown, he finds a school for the blind to ask for information. That way he can say “my girl is totally standing right over there, don’t worry about it, now, any chance you know where Terrible Author lives?”

…of course, the first person he asks has exactly the right answer and is happy to share. Convenient, that.

As mentioned, Terrible Author’s setup is suitably creepy and off-putting, but Pan doesn’t figure out anything about why. Doesn’t investigate. Didn’t come up with any kind of plan beforehand about how to coax Terrible Author into undoing his evil spell. Pan just confronts him, demands he fix Lyra, realizes this hasn’t fixed Lyra, and leaves.

There’s a bombshell much later on when Lyra finds out that Terrible Author is separated! And, although there’s a daemon who hangs around with him, they don’t actually belong to each other! This is fascinating and disturbing and would’ve been so much more satisfying if, you know, Pan had figured this out and was actively trying to bring the information to Lyra. Or, heck, if anything had been done with it at all.

Shortly afterward, Pan runs into this girl who just happens to be separated from her daemon, and is available and happy to team up with Pan, so they can head off to Weird Roseville together. Convenient. Again.

Lyra’s Bogus Journey:

Lyra has a much harder time staying out of sight than Pan, so she gets a lot more interaction along her trip.

Most of it is a long string of the same convenient “running into people who are helpful and friendly and have exactly the information she needs to move the plot along.” (More details on that below.)

When this happened in the original trilogy, it was the alethiometer deus-ex-machining her in the right direction, which worked! But here it seems to keep happening by accident. (She brings the alethiometer, but, as mentioned, she doesn’t use it.)

The Conveniently Helpful People also keep telling her (with minimal prompting, and what seems like total honesty?) whole backstories. All of which are more interesting than the actual narrative she’s going through.

They also occasionally mention God/the Authority, and Lyra doesn’t have much of a reaction. I wish, just once, she had snapped “it doesn’t matter what the Authority thinks! Or rather, what he used to think, since my boyfriend and I killed him when we were 12!”

The convenience also could’ve worked if Oakley Street agents were being cool and clever and actively tracking her journey in order to help. She does run into a few of them, but that seems to be by accident too.

And it could’ve worked if there was other magic steering her along — she keeps dropping the phrase “the secret commonwealth,” meaning the world’s hidden population of faeries and other supernatural creatures — but as of the end of the book, none of Lyra’s friendly helpers have been revealed to be anything other than human. (Some are modified in exotic ways, but they were human to start with, at least.)

Even farther towards the end of the book, after this long string of people being Conveniently Helpful For No Reason, she ends up in a train car with…and I wish I was making this up…a bunch of soldiers who are Inconveniently Attempted Rapists For No Reason.

That record-scratch moment your brain just did? That’s how it feels in the book, too. The attack comes out of nowhere, there’s suddenly a big action sequence with Lyra fighting back, their CO shows up and makes them let her go, and then she leaves the train and heads almost directly to the next bunch of Conveniently Helpful People.

If anyone wants more detailed spoilers, either to be prepared before reaching the scene or to decide whether you’ll read it at all, let me know.

To be blunt about one thing: from the in-scene descriptions I would’ve said none of these guys actually managed to get their dicks out, but a few days later we get the book’s first and only reference to Lyra having periods. And she doesn’t think “oh, thank republic-of-heavens, I’m not pregnant,” which suggests she knew it wasn’t a risk, but the whole Narrative Reason you write that in after an assault scene is because someone is afraid it’s a risk, so, what are you even doing, Pullman??

Okay, switching tracks.

Some of the people Lyra encounters, usually with personal stories that are way more interesting, and I wish they’d been [part of] the actual main plot:

A guy who meets her at a train station, says he has a friend who needs her help, leads her out into a maze of city streets where she explicitly thinks about how risky this is because she’s totally lost…but she does the mission and it’s fine and he leads her right back to the train station afterward.

The friend is a human who’s been modified by “a magician” to be some kind of fire-elemental person, and wants Lyra to help find his daemon, who was modified into a water-elemental form — a mermaid! This is cool and fascinating and scary and raises so many questions —

— and they get killed immediately after Lyra reunites them, and we never find out anything more about it.

The killer is the magician, who had been holding the water-sprite daemon captive. (And is possibly also the guy’s father? Finally, someone who can beat Marisa and Asriel in a “Bad Parenting Juice” drinking contest.) Which, again, is fascinating and evocative — how do you become a magician? Or are they born, like the witches? How many are there? What kinds of things are they doing in the world? —

— yeah, we don’t find out anything about that either.

Murderous Magician Dad just gives Lyra some helpful plot information, then sends her and the train-station guy off on their way.

A couple of guys who intervene when Lyra is being harassed at a bar.

They steer her outside, she’s prepared for a fight, but they hold up their hands and say they’re friendly, and also, they noticed someone steal the alethiometer bag off her earlier, so here, would she like it back?

They give her some helpful rumors, too. Don’t remember which specific ones, but they lead her to the next plot point.

A rich elderly princess who’s on the Daemonless International Support Group list, because her daemon fell in love (!) with another woman (!!) and eventually ran off with her (!!!).

Lyra thinks to herself that she’s seen other situations where a daemon and their human have different feelings about a romance. Just thinks it in passing, and then it’s gone. I want to see these situations! I want on-page exploration of multiple ways they can work! How do they correspond to the feelings of people in worlds where all the daemons are internal?

As for the princess, I already knew it was going to be a big scandal — two human women in that day and age could never be a couple, at least not in public, and A Literal Princess is a very public figure —

but then, in spite of the scandal, the princess moves in with the woman! And they travel together, they work together, they share a bed, she explains to Lyra that she played the role so thoroughly she made herself fall in love with the woman!

…and then it falls apart for some reason, and the princess leaves, but her daemon insists on staying. So that’s how they get separated. Deliberately walking away from each other.

There’s a brief reference to the idea of him wishing he was the other woman’s daemon, instead of the princess’s. How does that work? How do you get so disconnected from yourself, and in such a skewed partial-match with someone else, that you end up with that kind of yearning?

In case you can’t tell, I want to read this novel. I would trade the entirety of The Secret Commonwealth for this novel. No question, hands down.

Instead: Princess says “if you run into my daemon, tell him I’d like to see him again before we die?” Lyra says “sure, can do, thanks for the brunch.” And then, you guessed it, that whole scene is over and done with and we never get any follow-up on it again.

A pair of agents from Oakley Street, who say “hey, Lyra, have you considered using some basic disguise techniques, like dyeing your hair and wearing glasses?”

And then they give her a lovely haircut and a dye job and a spare pair of fake glasses.

This isn’t anywhere near the beginning of Lyra’s journey, by the way! This is more than 80% of the way through the book. There’s no special reason she needs it more after this point.

It’s like Pullman suddenly realized a disguise might help, wrote the scene at the point he had reached, and then never went back and edited to put it in a more meaningful location.

The stranger on a train who shows Lyra the deck of “exactly the same as an alethiometer” cards, gives her a demonstration of how to use them, and then leaves the whole deck behind for her to keep.

A married couple who don’t share any languages in common with Lyra, and don’t seem to have a lot of money…but feed her and let her stay at their house overnight, for free, even daemonless as she is. They also give her a free niqab so she can move around less conspicuously (she’s still injured from the fight with the soldiers).

A priest who invites her into his church, isn’t bothered when she takes off the niqab, helps treat her injuries, and gives her a motherlode of useful details about highly-illegal dealings he’s not even supposed to know about, but will unveil to this total stranger who just wandered in, because she needs them for the next plot point.

This when Lyra finds out that someone in this region has resurrected the Bolvangar method. But this time they aren’t kidnapping random children for it. No, they’re paying for it. If you’re poor enough, and desperate enough, and can’t spare any more kidneys, these people will buy your daemon to sell on the black market.

The city has a whole secret underclass of illegally-severed people working in the sewers.

Meanwhile, rich people who’ve been deserted by their daemons can purchase a stand-in. This is what Terrible Author did. Of course, it’s not a true replacement, but the dealers boast about their ability to make an excellent match.

There are also people who buy separated daemons for other scientific/experimental purposes. Details left to our imaginations.

This is a horrifying sinister mindblowing discovery, as much of a bombshell as the original Bolvangar was. I mean, it would’ve hit harder if Lyra had uncovered it by spying, or tricking someone into revealing the information, or anything more elaborate than “asking straightforward sorta-related questions and getting this whole sordid story infodumped by the first guy she asked,” but it’s still big.

So it’s gonna shake things up something fierce, right? Maybe Lyra won’t go full-on “calling in the cavalry to tear the place down” until Book 3, but this would be her new “stepping through the doorway into the sky” moment — where the horror of what she’s learned galvanizes her into making a pivotal decision, where she starts laying the groundwork for the revolution —

— no, of course not, this is where she starts going around to the hideouts of various undercover daemon-sellers and asking if they can help her find Pan.

Come on.

And this brings us to the end of the book. One of the black-market daemon-sellers guides Lyra to the creepy abandoned town where the final scene takes place.

In these last moments, the audience (but not Lyra) finds out that this guy has ulterior motives. Which would make it the first time in the whole book when “Lyra or Pan takes a Conveniently Helpful Person at face value with total credulity” turns out to be a bad idea.

(And, I mean, he’s a black-market daemon-seller. If anyone on that list was obviously an unethical scumball who shouldn’t be counted on….!)

Finally, a few things that don’t fit into any neat lists, but annoyed me enough to mention:

1) People curse in this book. Which is notable because they didn’t in HDM, and it wasn’t just the adults watching their mouths around tween Lyra — we got plenty of scenes that only had people like Mrs. Coulter and Lord Asriel in them. Those two would definitely be dropping f-bombs if it was a routine part of their world’s language, and this book reveals that it is.

So every time it happens it breaks your immersion, pointedly reminding you “this isn’t a real world, it’s a fake story where the author can switch the profanity-filter on and off at will.” Does it enhance the narrative in a way that’s worth the tradeoff? I don’t think so.

2) Before I read the book, I’d heard vague spoilers about “a character with a mermaid daemon,” and figured it was someone from a cool magical species — hopefully more expansion/exploration on the fairy from La Belle Sauvage whose daemon appeared to be “a whole flock of butterflies.”

But no, it’s a magically-modified human. His situation doesn’t get explored that deeply before he dies, or connect with anything else in the story. The fairy, meanwhile, does get mentioned when Malcolm tells Lyra about meeting her, but she doesn’t reappear or get any kind of follow-up.

In spite of the title, the only explicit appearance of any members of the “secret commonwealth” is some little glowing spirits, basically wights, that Lyra watches over the side of a gyptian boat one time.

3) There’s a scene where a bunch of people gather in a meeting hall to protest the Magisterium sabotaging their various rose-related livelihoods. A couple Magisterium reps are there. Malcolm is also there, and his POV basically goes “huh, looks like all the exits have gotten the doors shut. And barred. And suddenly they each have an armed Magisterium agent standing in front of them. That’s weird. Gonna keep quietly observing to find out what happens next.”

This guy is supposed to be a cool experienced anti-Magisterium spy! This is basically a giant neon sign flashing COMING UP NEXT: MASSACRE! (It is not a misdirect, either.)

And Malcolm sees it, but doesn’t read it, or take any action to try to subvert it, or even move to defend himself — it’s just like any cheesy horror movie where the audience is shouting LOOK BEHIND YOU at the unwitting character who’s about to get murdered.

Wrap-Up Thoughts

Whatever happens in the final volume of this trilogy, it might reveal things that redeem some of the problems in this book. But I’ll be honest, I’m not holding my breath.

And when I think about reveals that would address these problems, everything I come up with is stuff that should’ve just been in this book.

For example: let’s say the Fair Folk are directly involved after all, intervening to steer Lyra and Pan down the most convenient paths. In particular, the guy on the train who only appears long enough to give Lyra a set of alethiometry cards + a tutorial on how to use them — I really want him to be Fae. It’s so contrived and random if he’s not.

But the readers should know about it! Back in HDM, we would get scenes about the plans and activities of all the other factions at work. It might take a while to discover the exact details of (for example) the witches’ ultimate goal that Lyra was part of, but we knew they had a goal, and were supporting her in service of it. If the Secret Commonwealth is actively involved in the plot, we should’ve gotten that by now.

Semi-related: I feel like, if the rest of the book was better, then I’d have no trouble explaining a lot of the Lyra-specific issues as “she’s super-depressed, not in a place to make great choices or take a lot of decisive action.”

But it’s not like she’s drifting around in a trauma fog that hampers her ability to get things done. Her journey, while not perfect or threat-free, still comes together with improbable smoothness — as if the writing hasn’t noticed that she’s not being proactive and prescient and well-coordinated and overall super-competent about it. Meanwhile, other characters are underwhelming in the same way. (Looking at you, Malcolm “I Can’t Believe It’s Now a Bloodbath” Polstead.)

So it doesn’t seem like a conscious narrative choice to write Lyra this way. It just seems consistent with the complaints I have about everything else in the writing.

…let’s be honest, I’m almost certainly gonna read the third book anyway. I’m enough of a completist that it’ll bother me not to, I don’t have a lot of hard-stop dealbreakers that would make me bow out anyway, and, well, I do a lot of work that requires time-passing listening material. The Secret Commonwealth is nowhere near the most-frustrating audio I’ve used to fill that time.

But it hasn’t left me excited or optimistic or Shivering With Anticipation, either.

Mostly I just anticipate getting some useful stuff done while I listen, and then having a final set of reactions to work through in another one of these posts.

[mrscoultxr]

So I was thinking about how Dakota Blue Richards, who played Lyra in The Golden Compass, expressed interest in being included in the TV show in some way, and that made me realize that... uh... there are not a lot of female roles in HDM. Here, I’ll list every woman/girl (not including daemons) I can think of in ALL of HDM.

Mrs. Coulter

Lyra

Ma Costa

Serafina Pekkala

Ruta Skadi

Mary Malone

Dame Hannah Relf

Miss Lonsberry

Alice Parslow

Xaphania

The Lady Salmakia

Gracious Wings/No-Name, the harpy.

The harpies

The witches

The nurses at Bolvangar

and that’s it. Everyone else IN THE ENTIRE SERIES is a man or a boy. And only a handful of these women are in all the books. Like Serafina, Marisa, and Lyra. Those are the only three consistently mentioned in every single book. 

So uh, who is DBR gonna play that also honors her role in the movie? Not a lot of secondary named characters for women in this for her to take...

Big Yikes. 

[memoriesfrombooks]

The history behind Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the actual case of the Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, ages 12 and 14, and their forced sterilization at that age.. This book fictionalizes the story through the eyes of a nurse - Civil Townsend. What I really appreciate about this book is that it does not end neatly. An important book and an important conversation. 

Reviewed for NetGalley and a publisher’s blog tour.

[princessag-tv]

Alabama, Apologize, Write A Check

Alabama, Apologize, Write A Check

Two Sisters, Mary Alice and Minnie Lee Relf….. In Montgomery Alabama 1973 were sterilized against their wises through a federally funded clinic, over seen by the Office of Economic Opportunity, created in 1964 as a component of our nation’s so-called war on poverty. In the summer of 1973, one of the girls 12 years old and the other 14 was sterilized against their wishes. Their mother didn’t…

[libraryoftheancients]

Because this is a book blog, and because I apparently had a lot to say, I’m gonna repost my review of the new Phillip Pullman book here. Major spoilers for La Belle Sauvage below the cut, as well as probably some minor ones for His Dark Materials itself

It feels like I've been waiting most of my life for this book to come out, or at least however many years it's been since I first finished The Amber Spyglass. Was it worth the wait? Honestly, I'm not totally sure. This is a pretty fun story, and I like returning to Lyra's world, but I feel like I can't judge this properly until parts two and three come out.

This book, volume one of The Book of Dust, begins a decade before The Golden Compass, with Lyra as an infant. The events we already know about her early life - Asriel's duel with Mister Coulter, Lyra being denied the custody of either parent - have already happened. Lyra is in the care of an order of nuns, and across the river from them lives Malcolm, a new character. Well, Pullman says he's appeared before, but I certainly can't tell where. Malcolm feels a bit like a mix of Lyra and Will in some ways. While he has both his parents, he's fairly strong once push comes to shove, he learns to lie, and he loves discovering all sorts of stuff. This leads him to get involved in the spy ring working against the Magisterium and then to declare himself Lyra's protector. Given the interactions with Lyra, and his sense of love and devotion towards her, I can't help but wonder what Malcolm and Lyra's interactions will look like in future parts, especially since the story is set to end ten years after the original trilogy. Hannah Relf appears here and is a great character - sort of a different take on Mary in a lot of ways. I'm not entirely sure what to make of Alice, who is Malcolm's companion on his quest, though I love that she gets to say "fuck". Other characters from the original trilogy have brief appearances, including Lord Asriel, Mrs. Coulter, and Farder Coram.

The plot feels somewhat disjointed, in that to me it feels like it's split roughly into two halves. In the first half of the narrative, before the giant floods, we see what Malcolm's home life is like, his inquisitiveness, and the effects the Magisterium have on his world. This latter point has strong echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four, with children encouraged to spy on school teachers, parents, and neighbors, always searching for heresy. There's a strong thriller/spy fiction vibe here, as Malcolm, through his contact with Hannah, becomes a junior spy for a resistance movement. I'm curious to see how this aspect develops in later books: is Oakley Street tied to Asriel's plans somehow? What will they and the Magisterium do after the death of the Authority?

The latter half of the novel is triggered by a massive flood that sees Oxford and much of the rest of England drown. Malcolm and Alice, along with the infant Lyra, escape in the titular La Belle Sauvage, Malcolm's canoe. This choice for the origin of the title is interesting, because I had assume it would be named for Lyra, not an object. The three are pursued by a mad scientist bent on capturing or murdering the infant for reasons of revenge or blackmail. This part of the story takes on a more traditional quest structure, as Malcolm hopes to get Lyra into the care of Lord Asriel in London. The three run from the villain and encounter various obstacles, both mundane and supernatural. There are a few encounters with faeries, a new element to Lyra's world that I imagine will be expanded on in the second and third volumes. The mad scientist also is an interesting element because he and his dæmon are often at odds - he beats her, even as it causes the both of them hurt. In the end, after various mysteries and fights, Lyra is placed safely in sanctuary at Jordan College. The ending leaves it fairly unclear to me as to where the story is headed from here, as it pretty much ends as soon as Lyra has been accepted through scholastic sanctuary. What will happen to Alice and Malcolm is left open, and I really can't tell where to expect the next two books to head. With The Golden Compass, you at least knew the goal was learning more about Dust, but here, in spite of the title of this trilogy, even that feels uncertain.

In many ways, while this book certainly can be approached as a standalone by those who haven't read His Dark Materials, to me it feels like the first part of a single story, much as Lord of the Rings is really a single book published usually in three parts. I enjoyed reading this, but I can't say that this is exactly what I wanted when I knew The Book of Dust was happening for certain. However, I also feel like I can't properly judge this without the context of volumes two and three, so really all I can do now is feel like I'm in the same position I've been for over a decade: eagerly awaiting more of Lyra's adventures.

[reproductivejusticeforhighs-blog]

History of Forced Contraception & Sterilization

Women of color and low income women were specifically targeted by coerced sterilization and contraception throughout the 20th century. Because they were not seen as “good mothers” in comparison to their white counterparts, they were not encouraged to have children. Although this occurs much less frequently now, this is still an important issue that needs to be made known. Non-consensual sterilization and non-consensual long acting contraception both deprive women of their bodily autonomy, and have adverse effects on physical and mental health.

The idea of sterilization was founded on racist, classist ideology. The government falsely put forth that forced sterilization was necessary for population control. In response to the planet’s depleting resources, many people believed that limiting the population growth of nations by controlling women’s reproduction was the only way to preserve the finite resources for the population. But population growth is not the problem-the overconsumption of resources is. As Loretta Ross explains, “20% of the world's population controls 80% of the global wealth” (Ross, The Color of Choice). This argument deflects the fact that women of color and low income women were the main targets of this population control method. This video tells the story of reproductive justice advocate Loretta Ross’s own forced sterilization. It highlights the deeply rooted power struggle in the patient-doctor relationship. 

In one specific example, the Relf v. Weinberger case in 1973 exposed the forced sterilization and contraception of three black teenagers. Katie, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf lived in Alabama, were receiving welfare benefits from the US government. This qualified them for the Montgomery Community Action Committee’s Family Planning Service. Katie was unknowingly given a series of Depo-Provera contraceptive shots, and was scheduled for the insertion of an IUD (intrauterine device. Minnie Lee and Mary Alice received tubal ligations from the service, however their mother was led to believe they were being seen for routine inoculations. As a result of the case, the Supreme Court, “Set guidelines for the use of federal funds for sterilization, and outlined the illegality of the use of coercion...for failure to participate in these program” (Krase, History of Forced Sterilization and Current U.S. Abuses).

Hundreds of thousands of women went through similar experiences as the Relf sisters. What happened to them was unforgivable, and we need to work to ensure reproductive justice, especially for low income women and women of color.

[lodelss]

ACLU: Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself

Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself

The recent news of a whistleblower’s allegations that a for-profit ICE detention center forced sterilization procedures on immigrant women shocked many people and drew comparisons to Nazi sterilization campaigns. The ICE detention story reflects a long pattern in the United States of the coerced sterilization of marginalized populations, particularly of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. In fact, the Nazi’s borrowed ideas for their sterilization regimen from eugenic sterilization laws adopted in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Over the course of this long history, both public and private actors in the U.S. targeted the poor, the disabled, immigrants, and racial minorities for forced sterilization. Spurred by the eugenics movement popular at the turn of the century, states enacted laws beginning in 1907 that authorized the sterilization of the “feebleminded.” More than 60,000 coercive sterilizations were performed throughout the U.S. pursuant to these eugenics laws. In Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court legitimized early 20th century eugenic sterilization practices with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notorious declaration: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”   It was not until Nazi Germany adopted American eugenic theory and practice that public opinion about eugenics ultimately shifted in the United States. The counter-movement against eugenic sterilization culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1942 decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma. While Skinner rejected eugenic sterilization as a valid state goal and recognized that procreation is a basic civil right, the Supreme Court has never explicitly overruled Buck v. Bell.      Although support for eugenics-based sterilization laws waned, new justifications for coerced sterilization arose. Following World War II, concerns about population control, immigration, and welfare costs emerged as new rationales for targeting marginalized populations. By the 1960s, a new era of sterilization abuse was born, which once again focused on the poor, immigrants, and people of color.   For example, in the 1974 case of Relf v. Weinberger, a federal court found that poor people in the South were being forced to agree to sterilization when doctors threatened to withhold welfare benefits or medical care, including for childbirth. Relf involved the forced sterilization of two Black sisters, just 12 and 14 years old, who were sterilized by a federally-funded family planning clinic in Alabama. Their mother signed an “X” on a consent form she could not read, discovering too late that she had inadvertently “consented” to the permanent sterilization of her daughters Mary Alice and Minnie Relf. The federal court in Relf emphasized that coercive medical practices crossed the line between family planning and eugenics.   On the other side of the country and during the same era as Relf, the case of Madrigal v. Quilligan exposed coercive sterilization at the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center in the early 1970s. After a whistleblower leaked evidence of rampant sterilization abuse at the Medical Center, a group of women filed a lawsuit alleging that medical personnel systematically coerced Mexican American women into submitting to sterilization. The Madrigal case involved women whose primary language was Spanish and who had undergone a tubal ligation after childbirth by cesarean section. Hospital staff repeatedly approached the women for consent to sterilization while they were in the midst of labor — some after being heavily medicated — and pressured the women into signing English language consent forms that they could not understand.   A medical student who was a firsthand witness on the maternity ward testified about what she viewed as the Medical Center’s concerted effort to reduce the birth rate of racial minorities. The medical student detailed coercive practices she witnessed:

“The doctor would hold a syringe in front of the mother who was in labor pain and ask her if she wanted a pain killer; while the woman was in the throes of a contraction the doctor would say, ‘Do you want the pain killer? Then sign the papers. Do you want the pain to stop? Do you want to have to go through this again? Sign the papers.’”

The Madrigal case revealed how discrimination along intersectional lines of gender, race, poverty, and immigration status coalesced to result in sterilization abuse.   The recent allegation about coerced sterilizations of immigrant women at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia eerily echoes the story of Madrigal v. Quilligan. The complaint against ICDC asserts that officials transferred detainees to a physician who sterilized the women without proper informed consent. The whistleblower, nurse Dawn Wooten, described multiple forms of medical abuse, from failures to protect patients against COVID-19, to forced hysterectomies.   The reports of forced hysterectomies and other unwarranted gynecological procedures at ICDC were also intertwined with a pattern of lack of informed consent to medical treatment. In connection with the hysterectomies, Ms. Wooten explained: “These immigrant women, I don’t think they really, totally, all the way understand this is what’s going to happen depending on who explains it to them.”   Some nurses would try to communicate with detained immigrants by simply Googling Spanish rather than using appropriate interpretation protocols. One detained immigrant reported that the procedure she was supposed to have was never properly explained to her, stating that she “felt like they were trying to mess with my body.” When she asked what procedure was planned and why, she was given three different responses by three different individuals. As in the Madrigal case, the ICDC allegations raise the concern that medical personnel are targeting vulnerable women for coerced sterilization based on their race, poverty, and immigration status.   The allegation of coerced sterilization in ICE detention is far from the only form of reproductive injustice inflicted upon immigration detainees. Former Office of Refugee Resettlement Director Scott Lloyd attempted to block teen migrants from accessing abortion care, even when their pregnancies were the result of rape. The Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy forcibly separated parents from their children, including children under the age of five.   As advocates for reproductive justice have emphasized, the fundamental civil rights to abortion, procreation, and parenting are deeply linked. All three pillars of reproductive autonomy have been simultaneously under attack during the Trump Administration, especially in the context of immigration detention. Given Justice Ginsburg’s passing and the likelihood she will be replaced by a Trump appointee, reproductive justice advocates must work even more urgently to protect the reproductive autonomy of marginalized people.

Published September 29, 2020 at 06:06PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/36hsDCL from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Sc9uKc via IFTTT

[lodelss]

Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself

The recent news of a whistleblower’s allegations that a for-profit ICE detention center forced sterilization procedures on immigrant women shocked many people and drew comparisons to Nazi sterilization campaigns. The ICE detention story reflects a long pattern in the United States of the coerced sterilization of marginalized populations, particularly of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. In fact, the Nazi’s borrowed ideas for their sterilization regimen from eugenic sterilization laws adopted in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Over the course of this long history, both public and private actors in the U.S. targeted the poor, the disabled, immigrants, and racial minorities for forced sterilization. Spurred by the eugenics movement popular at the turn of the century, states enacted laws beginning in 1907 that authorized the sterilization of the “feebleminded.” More than 60,000 coercive sterilizations were performed throughout the U.S. pursuant to these eugenics laws. In Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court legitimized early 20th century eugenic sterilization practices with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notorious declaration: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”   It was not until Nazi Germany adopted American eugenic theory and practice that public opinion about eugenics ultimately shifted in the United States. The counter-movement against eugenic sterilization culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1942 decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma. While Skinner rejected eugenic sterilization as a valid state goal and recognized that procreation is a basic civil right, the Supreme Court has never explicitly overruled Buck v. Bell.      Although support for eugenics-based sterilization laws waned, new justifications for coerced sterilization arose. Following World War II, concerns about population control, immigration, and welfare costs emerged as new rationales for targeting marginalized populations. By the 1960s, a new era of sterilization abuse was born, which once again focused on the poor, immigrants, and people of color.   For example, in the 1974 case of Relf v. Weinberger, a federal court found that poor people in the South were being forced to agree to sterilization when doctors threatened to withhold welfare benefits or medical care, including for childbirth. Relf involved the forced sterilization of two Black sisters, just 12 and 14 years old, who were sterilized by a federally-funded family planning clinic in Alabama. Their mother signed an “X” on a consent form she could not read, discovering too late that she had inadvertently “consented” to the permanent sterilization of her daughters Mary Alice and Minnie Relf. The federal court in Relf emphasized that coercive medical practices crossed the line between family planning and eugenics.   On the other side of the country and during the same era as Relf, the case of Madrigal v. Quilligan exposed coercive sterilization at the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center in the early 1970s. After a whistleblower leaked evidence of rampant sterilization abuse at the Medical Center, a group of women filed a lawsuit alleging that medical personnel systematically coerced Mexican American women into submitting to sterilization. The Madrigal case involved women whose primary language was Spanish and who had undergone a tubal ligation after childbirth by cesarean section. Hospital staff repeatedly approached the women for consent to sterilization while they were in the midst of labor — some after being heavily medicated — and pressured the women into signing English language consent forms that they could not understand.   A medical student who was a firsthand witness on the maternity ward testified about what she viewed as the Medical Center’s concerted effort to reduce the birth rate of racial minorities. The medical student detailed coercive practices she witnessed:

“The doctor would hold a syringe in front of the mother who was in labor pain and ask her if she wanted a pain killer; while the woman was in the throes of a contraction the doctor would say, ‘Do you want the pain killer? Then sign the papers. Do you want the pain to stop? Do you want to have to go through this again? Sign the papers.’”

The Madrigal case revealed how discrimination along intersectional lines of gender, race, poverty, and immigration status coalesced to result in sterilization abuse.   The recent allegation about coerced sterilizations of immigrant women at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia eerily echoes the story of Madrigal v. Quilligan. The complaint against ICDC asserts that officials transferred detainees to a physician who sterilized the women without proper informed consent. The whistleblower, nurse Dawn Wooten, described multiple forms of medical abuse, from failures to protect patients against COVID-19, to forced hysterectomies.   The reports of forced hysterectomies and other unwarranted gynecological procedures at ICDC were also intertwined with a pattern of lack of informed consent to medical treatment. In connection with the hysterectomies, Ms. Wooten explained: “These immigrant women, I don’t think they really, totally, all the way understand this is what’s going to happen depending on who explains it to them.”   Some nurses would try to communicate with detained immigrants by simply Googling Spanish rather than using appropriate interpretation protocols. One detained immigrant reported that the procedure she was supposed to have was never properly explained to her, stating that she “felt like they were trying to mess with my body.” When she asked what procedure was planned and why, she was given three different responses by three different individuals. As in the Madrigal case, the ICDC allegations raise the concern that medical personnel are targeting vulnerable women for coerced sterilization based on their race, poverty, and immigration status.   The allegation of coerced sterilization in ICE detention is far from the only form of reproductive injustice inflicted upon immigration detainees. Former Office of Refugee Resettlement Director Scott Lloyd attempted to block teen migrants from accessing abortion care, even when their pregnancies were the result of rape. The Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy forcibly separated parents from their children, including children under the age of five.   As advocates for reproductive justice have emphasized, the fundamental civil rights to abortion, procreation, and parenting are deeply linked. All three pillars of reproductive autonomy have been simultaneously under attack during the Trump Administration, especially in the context of immigration detention. Given Justice Ginsburg’s passing and the likelihood she will be replaced by a Trump appointee, reproductive justice advocates must work even more urgently to protect the reproductive autonomy of marginalized people.

Published September 29, 2020 at 06:06PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/36hsDCL