Puerto Rico & Sterilization

Often people from poor countries lack all relevant information when faced with the option of sterilization. In many cases, the desperation of poverty drives them to agree to accept contraception or sterilization in return for payments in cash or kind. In such cases, choice simply does not exist.

"After the United States seized the island from Spain in 1898, U.S. sugar companies rapidly set up vast plantations while engaging in the wholesale eviction of small farmers. By 1925, less than 2 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the land, and 70 percent of the population was landless. With so many people out of work and livelihood, Puerto Rico suddenly had a problem that U.S. colonial officials labeled "overpopulation."

In the 1940s light manufacturing industries began to move in from the U.S. mainland, attracted by cheap labor and low taxes. Young women were a key and "docile" part of that labor force, but subject to "loss" (from the employer's point of view) due to pregnancy. The result was a massive sterilization campaign carried out by the local government and the IPPF, with U.S. government funding. Women were cajoled and coerced into accepting sterilization, often not even being told that the process wasn't reversible. The result was that by 1968 one-third of the women of childbearing age had been sterilized.61 The combination of mass sterilization and heavy out-migration due to a declining economy caused the population of Puerto Rico to actually drop-with no resultant improvement in living standards, or the environment." (http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssues/Population/Hunger/FoodFirst/Ante.asp)

In the 1950's Puerto Rican women were given caesarian sections so doctors could sterilize them more easily, other women would not be able to have their newborns back unless they agreed to sterilization.

During the same time period drug companies tested early forms of birth control and progesterone on Puerto Rican women, even though in the states experimental drugs were only approved to be tested on the insane and drug addicts. Often women were threatened with loosing their jobs if they did not participate.