Confronting a past of forced sterilization

New Mexico is taking on an investigation into the sterilization of Native American women through coercion, deception, or by merely carrying out procedures entirely without consent. The state is mainly looking at time in the 1970s following the establishment of the federal Office of Population Affairs and a policy change that increased reimbursements for outside doctors contracting with Indian Health Service (IHS) facilities for each procedure. Native Americans were included in groups targeted for sterilizations because of the false impression they were less intelligent and that they were not as productive members of society as other groups. In 10 years, Native American birth rates were more than halved. Other states and Canada have broached the topic of forced sterilization that tried to formalize racist policies in the name of public health. New Mexico is the first to take aim at the role IHS clinics played in carrying out the policies.

NM lawmakers plan truth and reconciliation for forced sterilizations

Monday, February 9, 2026

February 9, 2026 | Antonia Gonzales

For decades, Native women and other women of color were subjected to forced sterilization by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service.

New Mexico lawmakers introduced a memorial last week to create a truth and reconciliation commission that would conduct a study into the history, and continuing impacts of this abuse.

KUNM’s Jeanette DeDios (Jicarilla Apache and Diné) has this report.

Senate memorial 14 includes research dating to the 1970s which shows between 25%-50% of Indigenous women were sterilized, with some of the highest incidents occurring in New Mexico.

The memorial would develop a plan to create a state truth and reconciliation commission to research and find all cases of sterilization in the state, gather survivor testimony, and review and recommend educational policy.

Keely Badger is a human rights advocate who wrote her dissertation on the forced sterilization of Native women.

Lawmakers asked her about challenges finding and accessing records.

“I do think that the requests have to come from an official state body, official agencies, to get to the heart of this information. It is going to be more than one person’s ability to accumulate this information.”

She says this may have been intentional by the states.

“At a national level, they have sealed some of these records for a reason, in the same way that a lot of the information about the boarding school system was very challenging; took decades and decades of research to accumulate to get to a point where we could have a national apology.

“I believe that this is one of those situations where it is going to require real political will and advocacy from civil society groups to get to the real heart of this from a national perspective.”

If the memorial goes into law, New Mexico would be the first state in the nation to formally investigate and acknowledge these violations.

The memorial will head to the senate floor for a vote and if passed, will go to the House of Representatives.

Forced Sterlization of Native Women?

 

If passed, the resolution would make New Mexico the first state in the nation to formally acknowledge the reproductive abuse wrought on Native women by the federal government.

Jean Whitehorse's (Diné) Native name means "Many Children," but she only has one child. This spring, she spoke at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York to explain why.

In the 1970s, during an emergency visit to a Gallup, New Mexico, Indian Health Service facility, Whitehorse was coerced into signing consent papers for a procedure she later learned rendered her unable to have any more children.

READ:  https://nativenewsonline.net/health/stolen-generations-new-mexico-takes-historic-step-to-address-forced-sterilization-of-native-american-women 

Cuts to IHS, NABS Budget

Trump FY 2026 Budget Aims to Slash $900 Million from Indian Health Service

CA 64-page passback document from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), reviewed by Native News Online, outlines the Trump administration’s plans to significantly reduce the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) budget. Among the proposed cuts is a $900 million reduction to the Indian Health Service (IHS), a division within HHS.  Read More: https://nativenewsonline.net/health/trump-fy-2026-budget-aims-to-slash-30-to-indian-health-service

 

Trump administration makes major cuts to Native American boarding school research projects

By Associated Press |   April 19, 2025

Native American children at Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1901.

Heritage Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

AP  — 

At least $1.6 million in federal funds for projects meant to capture and digitize stories of the systemic abuse of generations of Indigenous children in boarding schools at the hands of the U.S. government have been slashed due to federal funding cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration.

The cuts are just a fraction of the grants canceled by the National Endowment for the Humanities in recent weeks as part of the Trump administration’s deep cost-cutting effort across the federal government. But coming on the heels of a major federal boarding school investigation by the previous administration and an apology by then-President Joe Biden, they illustrate a seismic shift.

“If we’re looking to ‘Make America Great Again,’ then I think it should start with the truth about the true American history,” said Deborah Parker, CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
 

The coalition lost more than $282,000 as a result of the cuts, halting its work to digitize more than 100,000 pages of boarding school records for its database.  Parker, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes in Washington state, said Native Americans nationwide depend on the site to find loved ones who were taken or sent to these boarding schools.

Settlement reached on IHS pedophile

 

 

A settlement has reportedly been reached between the U.S. government and victims of former Indian Health Service doctor Stanley Weber.

The Wall Street Journal reports, the government will pay somewhere between $1-2 million for each of the eight victims.

The lawsuit against the government claims the Indian Health Service ignored or tolerated Weber’s abuse.

Weber worked for IHS for more than 20 years.

The former pediatrician was convicted of raping and sexually assaulting children he treated in South Dakota and Montana.

In 2020, at age 71, Weber was sentenced to a string of life sentences in prison.

The settlement has not been finalized.

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Mass Sterilization: Reproduction on the Rez

A 1970 Law Led to the Mass Sterilization of Native American Women. That History Still Matters

by Brianna Theobald Brianna Theobald is the author of Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century, available now from the University of North Carolina Press.

Marie Sanchez, chief tribal judge on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, arrived in Geneva in 1977 with a clear message to deliver to the United Nations Convention on Indigenous Rights. American Indian women, she argued, were targets of the “modern form” of genocide—sterilization.
Over the six-year period that had followed the passage of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, physicians sterilized perhaps 25% of Native American women of childbearing age, and there is evidence suggesting that the numbers were actually even higher. Some of these procedures were performed under pressure or duress, or without the women’s knowledge or understanding. The law subsidized sterilizations for patients who received their health care through the Indian Health Service and for Medicaid patients, and black and Latina women were also targets of coercive sterilization in these years.
But while Sanchez and the Native women with whom she organized responded to the results of that 1970 law, they also recognized that the fight against involuntary sterilization was one of many intertwined injustices rooted—as was their resistance—in a much longer history of U.S. colonialism. And that history continues to this day.
When the federal government forced Native peoples onto reservations in the 19th century, the situation produced a cascade of public-health disasters. By 1900, the American Indian population had reached its nadir of less than a quarter million. Infants and children proved particularly vulnerable to illness and death. One government official estimated in 1916 that approximately three-fifths of Indian infants died before age 5. On many reservations, women responded by bearing more children despite their compromised health. The historian Frederick Hoxie has argued that “only the maintenance of extraordinarily high birth rates” saved one nation from “dropping into oblivion.”

KEEP READING

Sterlization of Indian Women

The United States did attempt to destroy future generations of American Indians using their own agency Indian Health Services, who successfully sterilized 35% of Indian women without their knowledge and consent.

In his report "A History of Governmentally Coerced Sterilization: The Plight of the Native American Woman," published on May 1, 1997 by Michael Sullivan DeFine, University of Maine School of Law, writes:

The United States General Accounting Office Investigation of the Indian Health Service (HIS) Procedures and the Meaning behind Statistics of Population Growth: Complaints of these unethical sterilization practices continued, but little was done until the matter was brought to the attention of Senator James Abourezk (D-SD). Finally, affirmative steps were taken - specifically the commissioning of the General Accounting Office - to investigate the affair and to determine if the complaints of Indian women were true - that they were undergoing sterilization as a means of birth control, without consent. The problem with the investigation was that it was initially limited to only four area Indian Health Service hospitals (later twelve); therefore, the total number of Indian women sterilized remains unknown.

The General Accounting Office came up with a figure of 3,400 women who had been sterilized; but others speculate that at least that many had been sterilized each year from 1972 through 1976.

The General Accounting Office confined its investigation to Indian Health Service records and failed to probe case histories, to observe patient-doctor relationships, or to interview women who had been sterilized. This deplorable lack of thorough investigation only served as an attempt to placate the concerns of Indian people.

The General Accounting Office investigators concluded that Indian Health Service consent procedures lacked the basic elements of informed consent, particularly in informing a patient orally of the advantages and disadvantages of sterilization. Furthermore, the consent form had only a summary of the oral presentation, and the form lacked the information usually located at the top of the page notifying the patient that no federal benefits would be taken away if she did not accept sterilization. The General Accounting Office notified the Indian Health Service that it should implement better consent procedures. Some Indian Health Service Area Directors were pressured by local Indians and by Indian physicians and staff to suspend certain nurses and to move the hospital administrators to another post. Other than that, however, there was little else done by government officials.

Outraged by the level of governmental inaction, Indian people accused the Indian Health Service of making genocide a part of its policy. For the Indian Health Service, this was a serious accusation, as the purpose of this agency was to somehow alleviate the terrible health conditions in Indian communities. The Indian Health Service defended itself by relying on the inaccurate sterilization figures provided by the General Accounting Office. In reality, however, the accusation of genocide was not far off base.

As Thomas Littlewood stated in his book on the politics of population control, “non-white Americans are not unaware of how the American Indian came to be called the vanishing American . . . [t]his country’s starkest example of genocide in practice.”

From a statistical point of view, the reality of the devastation of Native American women victimized by sterilization can be observed through the comments of Senator Abourezk himself:  “...given the small American Indian population, the 3,400 Indian sterilization figure [out of 55,000 Indian women of childbearing age] would be compared to sterilizing 452,000 non-Indian women.”

Conclusion:  Science has provided a means of categorizing and victimizing those in society deemed unworthy of continued existence. Its influence in academic and political circles has created a pervasive social bigotry that rewards extermination over reform. The failure to embrace the racial and cultural diversity of this country has left a wake of destruction and oppression in minority populations. It is time for the pundits of social change to rearrange their thinking and give back to the people the power to choose what is right for themselves. [Footnotes removed]