Understand this: The US has LONG targeted Black, Native, Chicanx, Boricua, and other negatively racialized people - and especially disabled BIPOC - for forced sterilizations. Justifying eugenic sterilization based on imputed criminality, sexual deviance, and mental defectiveness.

Eugenics is a core component of and central to white supremacy, settler colonialism, patriarchy, and ableism. The categories of criminality, sexual deviance, and mental defectiveness intentionally blurred/overlapped. They are all social constructs, weaponized by systems of power.

The Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell in 1927 was the result of a test case meant to enshrine and institutionalize eugenic sterilization, brought by eugenics thought leaders, considered the progressives of their day. Carrie Buck was a white woman labeled feeble-minded.

Carrie Buck's mother was also labeled feeble minded. Confined at the Virginia Colony for the Feeble Minded, Carrie was sent out as an indentured servant to do domestic work. One of the household members raped her. Her child, conceived in rape, was ALSO labeled mentally defective.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the court, supported eugenic sterilization of those "manifestly unfit." He wrote, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." (Imbecile used to be a medical diagnostic term.)

This decision has NEVER been overturned.

In fact, not only has the Supreme Court never overturned Buck v. Bell - a court case supporting eugenic sterilization as in the public interest - but it was actually cited as supporting precedent in Roe v. Wade.

Reproductive Justice IS Disability Justice IS Racial Justice.

It is horrifying, enraging, disgusting to know that the US is systematically sterilizing detained immigrants, especially those assumed to be women and many Indigenous to South+Central America. It's also entirely unsurprising. The US has LONG used racist eugenic sterilization.

After carrying out tens of thousands of documented eugenic sterilizations, California officially outlawed the practice in 1979. But community organizers+advocates documented sterilizations in California prisons - mostly of Chicana, Black, and Asian women - as recently as 2013.

And understand, forced sterilizations at the scale we are learning about now are a very specific form of eugenic violence - they are a genocidal policy and practice.

Make no mistake - ableism, racism, and nationalism are violent, dangerous, and deadly.

Listen to and learn from the Black, Brown, Native, and Asian queer and trans disabled people who have been writing, thinking, and speaking for years on the vast, deep, and intricate connections among patriarchal, racist, ableist, and settler violence.

Your analysis and activism will fail if they do not include an understanding of the centrality and necessity of ableism in perpetuating state violence, upholding white supremacy, entrenching settler colonialism, and enforcing patriarchal, queermisic, transmisic oppression.

Abolition means ending immigration prisons and violence in the name of maintaining settler-created borders. It means ending police, prisons, and obsession with punishment. It means ending disability institutionalization in all its forms. It means ending the carceral state.

There is neither justice nor peace, and there will be neither justice nor peace, for as long as the state creates, maintains, and enforces dangerous and deadly beliefs - rooted in white supremacy, capitalism, and ableism - about whole populations as expendable and disposable.