Decades After Forced Sterilization, Native American Women in the US Still Face Rejection and Retraumatization in Healthcare

Copyright

2019

This story discusses how the American Indian Movement (AIM) first discovered evidence of ongoing involuntary sterilization of Native American women in records they removed after occupying the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972. Across the entire country, an estimated 25 percent of Native women of childbearing age were sterilized by 1976. It explains that, given the compounding historical trauma and racism that Natives experience, many Indigenous people who seek treatment today wonder if they’ll find rejection or further retraumatization.