Abortion advocates falsely blame pro-lifers after nurse claims women detained by ICE were forcibly sterilized

UPDATE, 9/23/20: A September 22 Washington Post report notes that Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) “wrote a letter signed by 173 lawmakers demanding a DHS inspector general investigation” claiming that “[t]here may be at minimum 17 to 18 women who were subjected to unnecessary medical gynecological procedures from just this one doctor, often without appropriate consent or knowledge, and with the clear intention of sterilization.” However, records from the hospital in Georgia alleged to have been the site of such sterilizations only has a record of two sterilization procedures being performed there.

The attorney for ERH Healthcare called the accusations of forced sterilizations “demonstrably false.”

UPDATE, 9/17/20: According to Fox News, “The Office of the Inspector General, which provides independent oversight and accountability within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has opened an investigation into the allegations presented in a whistleblower’s complaint from a former nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga.”

Fox noted that Ada Rivera, medical director for ICE Health Service Corps, told The Wall Street Journal, “The accusations will be fully investigated by an independent office, however, ICE vehemently disputes the implication that detainees are used for experimental medical procedures.”

An attorney for the doctor, who denies the claims, identified him as Dr. Mahendra Amin. Amin and another physician were investigated in 2015 by the Justice Department “for allegedly making false claims to Medicaid and Medicare; they both paid $525,000 in a civil settlement,” reported Fox.

Amin emigrated to the United States from India.

9/15/20: A nurse who worked at a Georgia Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center has come forward, alleging that undocumented immigrant women held there have been forced into hysterectomies without their consent. Dawn Wooten worked at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC), which is operated by LaSalle Corrections, a private, for-profit prison company. Wooten worked with multiple advocacy groups to file a complaint with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The complaint was first obtained by Law and Crime, which published the full 27-page document. Wooten, along with other immigrant women in ICDC, alleged that women were being referred to a certain gynecologist who performed hysterectomies without cause, and without the women’s consent. “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp,” one woman, who was not named, said in the complaint. “It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.”

Wooten further stated that while some of the women did have medical problems, she believed this did not explain the number of hysterectomies performed, saying, “[E]verybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.” She further explained:

Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy — just about everybody. He’s even taken out the wrong ovary on a young lady [detained immigrant woman]. She was supposed to get her left ovary removed because it had a cyst on the left ovary; he took out the right one. She was upset. She had to go back to take out the left and she wound up with a total hysterectomy. She still wanted children — so she has to go back home now and tell her husband that she can’t bear kids… she said she was not all the way out under anesthesia and heard him [the doctor] tell the nurse that he took the wrong ovary.

READ: Black woman sterilized due to eugenic agenda of Planned Parenthood board member

Many women who had hysterectomies said they were taken to the doctor without knowing why they were going, or what was going to happen to them, possibly due to the language barrier. “We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out,” Wooten said in the complaint. “That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly… is he collecting these things or something… Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out.”

Given the horrific nature of the allegations, many immediately demanded an explanation. ICE released a statement saying that while they take all complaints seriously, they cannot comment on the allegations yet. “[A]nonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve,” the statement read. “The agency maintains that the Irwin County Detention Center has been inspected multiple times, with and without warning, and that the facility has been found to be in compliance with Performance Based National Detention Standards.”

Interestingly, many within the abortion industry began condemning the report and demanding explanations. These demands are rightly being called out for their hypocrisy, as abortion advocates have a long history of looking the other way while the abortion industry and its eugenicist cohorts have forced minority women into sterilization.

Pro-abortion House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted that if the allegations are true, it is a “staggering abuse of human rights.” Students for Life of America president Kristan Hawkins tweeted in response, “I guess I’ll wait here for you to return your Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood as you know she founded a whole organization for this,” referring to Sanger’s eugenic philosophies that led her to found Planned Parenthood.

Live Action founder and President Lila Rose tweeted that “if true, [the doctor] & anyone else complicit must be held accountable for these crimes.” But as Rose later pointed out, pro-abortion outrage over forced sterilization seems more than a little hypocritical. She tweeted to NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue, “Planned Parenthood – your ally in the pro-abortion fight – has been one of the biggest promoters historically of coercive and forced sterilization… Are you cutting your partnership with them?”

What makes Hogue’s outrage even more stunning is that one of NARAL’s founders, Garrett Hardin, said, “The idea of sterilization as punishment is unrealistic…. But if we think of it in fact as helping the woman, the family and the world, sterilization doesn’t seem so bad.” He also said the “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” Read more about Hardin here.

Both decades ago and in recent years, Black women in particular have come forward saying they were pressured and forced into sterilizations against their will and sometimes against their knowledge.

What abortion industry leaders aren’t saying when they tweet their outrage is that forced sterilization was entirely in line with the goals of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who only now is being held accountable for her racist and eugenicist views. Until recently, abortion advocates have denied the facts, which include Sanger’s ties to white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Sanger even spoke at a Klan meeting, and launched what she called her “Negro Project,” in which she argued that her movement must make use of ministers and doctors in the Black community:

We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal.

We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Sanger likewise argued that those she deemed unworthy — minorities, the poor, people with disabilities — should not be permitted to “breed.” This mindset was used in the U.S. against Native Americans, Black women, and people with intellectual disabilities, all human rights violations which continued to take place as late as the 1970s.

READ: For decades, the U.S. has sent unsafe contraceptives rejected by the FDA to developing nations

And yet, as the abortion industry inexplicably twists itself into knots to claim the ICE allegations somehow shine a poor light on the pro-life movement, it is pro-lifers who have consistently called attention to these abuses, both those in the past and those currently taking place.

Tennessee prison inmates were being coerced into sterilization as recently as 2017, and pro-lifers condemned it; people with disabilities in countries like Japan and the United Kingdom were forced into long-term birth control or sterilization, and pro-lifers condemned it; Indigenous women were forcibly sterilized in Canada, and pro-lifers condemned it. Most recently, pro-lifers have condemned the imprisonment, sterilizations, forced abortions, and other human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims in China.

For decades, China has forcibly sterilized women and forcibly aborted their babies, and pro-lifers have been sounding the alarm. Where was the pro-abortion outrage? Where were their demands for “choice” for Chinese women whose viable babies were and still are ripped from their wombs?

All along, pro-lifers have called attention to these atrocities and demanded that they be stopped. Yet in too many cases, the abortion industry has looked the other way, denied the abuses were happening, and denied their own complicity. The International Planned Parenthood Federation has even partnered with the Chinese Communist Party – notorious for its oppressive One Child Policy – in achieving its “family planning” goals.

The allegations from the ICE facility are horrific, and if they are found to be true, all those responsible should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. The only question is if afterwards, the abortion industry will return to cooperating with forced sterilization and pretending it never happens.

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