In the 1970s, a U.S. agency responsible for Native American healthcare sterilized thousands of women without their full and informed consent, robbing them of the opportunity to start or expand their families.
Decades afterward, the state of New Mexico is poised to probe into that distressing history and its enduring damage.
New Mexico legislators greenlit a measure this week directing the state Indian Affairs Department and the Commission on the Status of Women to examine the history, extent, and ongoing effects of forced and coerced sterilizations of women of color by the Indian Health Service and other providers. The results are slated to be submitted to the governor by the close of 2027.
“It’s crucial for New Mexico to grasp the atrocities that occurred within our state’s boundaries,” stated state Sen. Linda Lopez, one of the bill’s sponsors.
It isn’t the first state to face its past. In 2023, Vermont initiated a project to study forced sterilization of marginalized groups, including Native Americans. In 2024, California started compensating individuals who were sterilized without consent in state-operated prisons and hospitals.
The New Mexico Legislature also established the groundwork to form a distinct healing commission and to formally recognize a little-known piece of history that plagues Native families
Sarah Deer, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, stated that this is long overdue.
“The women in these communities bear these stories,” she said.
Apart from a 1976 U.S. Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has never recognized what Deer refers to as a campaign of ‘systemic’ sterilizations in Native American communities.
The Indian Health Service and its parent body, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, did not reply to multiple emails seeking comment on New Mexico’s investigation.
A troubling history
In 1972, Jean Whitehorse was admitted to an Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, New Mexico, with a ruptured appendix. At just 22 and a new mother, Whitehorse recalled experiencing ‘severe pain’ as providers handed her a flurry of consent forms before rushing her into emergency surgery.
Whitehorse, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, said, ‘The nurse held the pen in my hand. I just signed on the line.’
A few years later, when she had trouble conceiving a second child, Whitehorse returned to the hospital and learned she had had a tubal ligation. She said this news devastated her, contributed to the breakdown of her relationship, and led her into a spiral of alcoholism.
Advocates were already warning about women like Whitehorse who entered IHS clinics and hospitals to give birth or for other procedures and later found themselves unable to conceive. The activist group Women of All Red Nations (WARN), a branch of the American Indian Movement, was established partly to expose this practice.
In 1974, Choctaw and Cherokee physician Connie Redbird Uri reviewed IHS records and claimed that the federal agency had sterilized up to 25% of its childbearing-age female patients. Some women Uri interviewed didn’t know they’d been sterilized. Others said they were pressured into consenting or tricked into thinking the procedure was reversible.
Uri’s allegations spurred the GAO audit, which discovered that the Indian Health Service sterilized 3,406 women in four of its 12 service areas between 1973 and 1976, including in Albuquerque. The agency found some patients were under 21 and most had signed forms not in line with federal regulations for informed consent.
GAO researchers concluded that interviewing women who had been sterilized ‘wouldn’t be fruitful,’ citing a single study of cardiac surgical patients in New York who had trouble recalling past doctor conversations. Advocates say the full extent and impact remain unaccounted for due to the lack of patient interviews and the GAO audit’s limited scope.
A venue to tell their stories
Whitehorse said she didn’t share her experience for nearly 40 years. First, she told her daughter. Then, other family members.
Whitehorse said, ‘Every time I tell my story, it eases the shame and guilt. Now I think, why should I be ashamed? It’s the government that should be ashamed of what they did to us.’
Whitehorse now advocates publicly for victims of forced sterilization. In 2025, she testified about the practice to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and called on the United States to issue a formal apology.
Whitehorse hopes New Mexico’s investigation will provide more victims a platform to share their stories. But advocates like Rachael Lorenzo, executive director of the Albuquerque-based sexual and reproductive health organization Indigenous Women Rising, say the commission must be cautious to avoid re-traumatizing survivors across generations.
Lorenzo said, ‘It’s such a taboo topic. A lot of support is needed when we share these traumatic stories.’
In a New Mexico legislative hearing earlier this month, retired Indian Health Service physician Dr. Donald Clark testified that he has seen patients in their 20s and 30s ‘seeking contraception but not trusting they won’t be irreversibly sterilized’ because of stories quietly passed down by their grandmothers, mothers, and aunts.
Clark stated, ‘It’s still an issue affecting women’s choice of birth control today.’
A pattern of disenfranchisement
A 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell upheld states’ right to sterilize people deemed ‘unfit’ to reproduce, paving the way for forced sterilization of immigrants, people of color, disabled individuals, and other disenfranchised groups throughout the 20th century.
According to Lorenzo and Deer, the sterilization of Native American women fits into a pattern of federal policies aimed at disrupting Native people’s reproductive autonomy, from the systematic removal of Indigenous children to government boarding schools and non-Native foster homes to the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prohibits tribal clinics and hospitals receiving federal funding from performing abortions in nearly all cases.
In Canada, doctors have been fined as recently as 2023 for sterilizing Indigenous women without their consent.
Deer stated that New Mexico’s investigation could pave the way for accountability. But without cooperation from the federal government, Deer said the commission’s fact-finding capabilities would be restricted.