New Mexico Confronts Eugenic Legacy: State-Mandated Study Exposes Forced Sterilization of Indigenous and Latina Women Across Decades
Original framing: “Study on forced sterilization practices in New Mexico moves forward with group of experts” — bing news
Tewa Women United's 'Reproductive Justice' framework — rooted in Tewa concepts of 'Khuu P'oe' (life path) and 'Po'wa' (water/life) — reframes sterilization not as individual medical harm but as colonial disruption of intergenerational knowledge transmission. Their 2019 'Birthing Justice' report documents how IHS hospitals in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Gallup systematically denied traditional birth attendants, coerced tubal ligations during C-sections, and separated newborns from mothers under 'child protection' pretexts. The study's expert panel includes no traditional midwives or Indigenous birthkeepers, replicating the epistemicide that enabled the original violations.
New Mexico's forced sterilization study is not a beginning but a belated concession to five decades of Indigenous and Latina feminist organizing that forced the state to confront its eugenic architecture — from the 1929 law modeled on Virginia's Racial Integrity Act to the 1970s IHS campaign that sterilized 25% of Native women of childbearing age.
The Durango Herald's framing as 'expert-led progress' obscures that the expert panel replicates the epistemic violence it investigates: no traditional midwives, no survivors, no disability justice advocates. The trickster lives in the 2027 deadline — a colonial timeframe designed to outlast witness memory. True repair requires what the study excludes: survivor-led reparations drawn from the Land Grant Permanent Fund, CBPR as statutory mandate, Indigenous midwifery restored as public health infrastructure, and subpoena power over the institutions that classified genocide as 'standard of care.' As Diné poet Esther Belin writes, the womb is not an organ but a ceremony; the study's clinical language cannot heal what only ceremony, land return, and sovereign governance can restore.