In the 1970s, U.S. institutions that provided health care to Native Americans sterilized thousands of women without their full informed consent, denying them the opportunity to start or start families.
Decades later, New Mexico will investigate this disturbing history and its lasting harm.
New Mexico lawmakers this week approved a measure requiring the state’s Department of Indian Affairs and the Commission on the Status of Women to review the history, scope and ongoing impact of forced sterilization of women of color by the Indian Health Service and other providers. The findings are expected to be reported to the governor by the end of 2027.
“It is important for New Mexico to understand the atrocities occurring within our state’s borders,” said state Sen. Linda Lopez, one of the bill’s sponsors.
It is not the first country to confront its past. In 2023, Vermont launched truth and reconciliation commission Study of forced sterilization of marginalized groups, including Native Americans. In 2024, California begins Pay compensation Those who were sterilized without their consent in state-run prisons and hospitals.
The New Mexico Legislature also laid the groundwork for a separate healing commission and formal recognition of a little-known history that plagues Native families.
Sarah Deer, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, said this is long overdue.
“The women of these communities carry these stories,” she said.
Aside from a 1976 U.S. Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has never acknowledged what Deal calls a “systematic” sterilization campaign against Native American communities.
The Indian Health Service and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment on the New Mexico investigation.
a disturbing history
In 1972, Jean Whitehorse was admitted to an Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, New Mexico, with a ruptured appendix. Whitehorse, 22, said she remembers experiencing “extreme pain” as medical providers presented her with a series of consent forms before rushing her into emergency surgery.
“The nurse put the pen in my hand. I just signed on the phone line,” said Whitehorse, a Navajo Nation citizen.
Years later, while she was trying to conceive her second child, Whitehorse said she returned to the hospital and learned she had a tubal ligation. She said the news devastated Whitehorse, causing the breakdown of her relationship and leading to her descent into alcoholism.
Advocates have sounded the alarm about women like Whitehorse who enter IHS clinics and hospitals to give birth or undergo other procedures and later find out they can’t get pregnant. The activist group Women of All Red Nations (WARN)—an offshoot of the American Indian Movement—was founded in part to expose the practice.
In 1974, Choctaw and Cherokee doctor Connie Redbird Uri reviewed IHS records and claimed that the federal agency had sterilized as many as 25 percent of its female patients of childbearing age. Some of the women Yuri interviewed were unaware they had been sterilized. Others say they were coerced into agreeing or were misled into believing the surgery was reversible.
Urie’s allegations prompted a Government Accountability Office audit, which found that between 1973 and 1976, the Indian Health Service sterilized 3,406 women in four of the agency’s 12 service areas, including Albuquerque. The agency found that some patients were under 21 years old and that most signed forms that did not comply with federal regulations designed to ensure informed consent.
GAO researchers concluded that interviewing women who had undergone sterilization “would not be productive,” citing a study of New York heart surgery patients who had difficulty recalling past conversations with their doctors. Advocates say its full scope and impact remain unexplained due to a lack of patient interviews and the narrow scope of the GAO audit.
a place to tell their stories.
She said Whitehorse hadn’t shared her experience in nearly 40 years. She told her daughter first. Then came the rest of the family.
“Every time I tell my story, it relieves the shame and guilt,” Whitehorse said. “Now I think, why should I be ashamed? The government should be ashamed of what they are doing to us.”
Whitehorse now publicly defends victims of forced sterilization. In 2025, she testified about this practice to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and called on the United States to issue a formal apology.
Whitehorse hopes the New Mexico investigation will give more victims a venue to tell their stories. But advocates like Rachel Lorenzo, executive director of Indigenous Women Rising, an Albuquerque sexual and reproductive health organization, said the commission must be careful to avoid re-traumatizing generations of survivors.
“This is a taboo subject. It takes a lot of support when we tell these painful stories,” Lorenzo said.
At a legislative hearing in New Mexico earlier this month, Dr. Donald Clark, a retired Indian Health Service doctor, testified that he has seen patients in their 20s and 30s “seeking birth control but not trusting themselves to not be irreversibly sterilized” because of stories whispered by their grandmothers, mothers and aunts.
“This is still an issue that affects women’s birth control choices today,” Clark said.
Patterns of disenfranchisement
The 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell upheld states’ right to sterilize those they deemed “unfit” to reproduce, paving the way for forced sterilization of immigrants, people of color, the disabled, and other disenfranchised groups throughout the 20th century.
According to Lorenzo and Diehl, the sterilization of Native American women fits a pattern of federal policies designed to undermine Native reproductive autonomy, from the systematic transfer of Native children to government boarding schools and non-Native foster homes to the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prohibited tribal clinics and hospitals receiving federal funding from performing abortions in almost all circumstances.
In Canada, doctors Sanctioned As recently as 2023, Aboriginal women were sterilized without their consent.
Diehl said the New Mexico investigation could pave the way for accountability. But Diehl said the commission’s fact-finding abilities would be limited without federal cooperation.