For Survivors of Forced Sterilization in California Prisons, a Rushed Shot at Justice

As California continues to grapple with the state’s long and dark history of forcibly sterilizing women incarcerated in state-run prisons, advocates are now rushing to meet a New Year’s Day deadline for seeking compensation for victims. And they’re frustrated by all the bureaucratic hurdles that officials have put in their way, which have resulted in hundreds of denials of women who say they were robbed of their ability to have children.

Pressure from advocates for incarcerated people and investigative reporting pushed California officials to take action in recent years. In 2021 state lawmakers passed a reparations program to provide $35,000 to each person who was involuntarily sterilized while in state custody. 

But that program has compensated only a fraction of the around 800 women identified by a state audit who underwent procedures that could have resulted in sterilization while imprisoned between 2005 and 2013; that state audit also found that prison doctors regularly violated the consent process for such procedures during that time. As of June, the California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB), the body tasked with determining who gets reparations under the program, has approved compensation for roughly 120 of those survivors, according to documents from the board.

The board has denied more than 430 of the 549 applications it reviewed, rejecting about 4 in 5 people who sought compensation, according to documents from the board. The board told Bolts in a statement that more than 200 of the applications it denied came from “currently incarcerated male inmates.”

Advocates helping people seek redress for being involuntarily sterilized in state custody say the high denial rate is a result of the board’s narrow definition of sterilization. For instance, until recently, the board rejected cases of women subjected without consent to endometrial ablations—a procedure that, while not clinically defined as sterilization, greatly reduces the chances of pregnancy and leads to much more dangerous pregnancies for people who can still become pregnant.

This summer, the state compensation board was forced to reconsider an application from Geynna Buffington, who underwent an ablation procedure in prison without her consent that made her unable to get pregnant. The board had denied Buffington’s application four times before she sued and an Alameda County Superior Court judge ordered the board to reconsider, ruling that she was wrongfully denied compensation. The board approved her application about two months later.

After the June court ruling, California lawmakers passed a law that gave people who had previously been denied up until Jan. 1, 2025 to appeal their rejections and ordered the board to reconsider those cases. A board spokesperson told Bolts in a statement that it sent letters to applicants who had previously been denied telling them they could still appeal. 

John Moore, an Oakland attorney who represented Buffington, says her case should force the board to approve other people who sought compensation for ablations. But he’s also worried that, with just weeks to go until the January deadline, many victims still don’t understand that the board will now reconsider a previous rejection. 

Moore also says the extended deadline to appeal rejections won’t help women who experienced forced or involuntary sterilizations in prison who never applied in the first place because of the compensation board’s narrow approach. The board stopped receiving new applications at the end of 2023. And while the board conducted outreach to victims when it was receiving applications, Moore says those efforts overlooked people who didn’t fit their limited standards for sterilization procedures.   

“I think there’s a whole population of hundreds of other women who didn’t even know about the benefit program because they never got the notice that the state was required to send, because the state determined that if you had an ablation you didn’t qualify for benefits,” Moore told Bolts.

Advocates say the state’s compensation program created another burden that retraumatized those who already experienced an injustice by the state. Jennifer James, associate professor at the Institute for Health & Aging at the University of California, San Francisco, had been working with incarcerated women who were sterilized with an ablation procedure and said it seemed like many have given up on seeking restitution.

“For some people who were denied, they just feel like once again, no one cares, and that’s incredibly heartbreaking,” James said. “I think that it felt to some people like it was more of a fight than it should have.”

California’s shameful history of involuntarily sterilizing people goes back to the early 1900s, when about 20,000 Californians were forcibly sterilized in state-run facilities, mostly mental institutions, from 1909 to 1963 to rid society of people labeled “feeble-minded” or “defectives.” California was such a leader in eugenics that historians say the Nazis sought the state’s advice for their own sterilization program in the 1930s.

News about the forced sterilizations in California’s state-run prisons came to light in 2013 with an exposé by the Center for Investigative Reporting, which uncovered that doctors under contract with the state prison system sterilized nearly 150 women without the required approvals between 2006 and 2010. 

The news outlet also interviewed an OB-GYN at Valley State Prison, James Heinrich, who claimed he was providing an important service to poor women. “Over a 10-year period, that isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for those unwanted children—as they procreated more,” he said in 2013.  

In 2014, the California State Auditor found many violations of the consent process leading up to the sterilization procedures, including physicians failing to sign documents certifying that the women “appeared mentally competent and understood the lasting effects of the procedure.” They also found that the sterilizations were not always reported if they were conducted alongside another procedure, such as a woman giving birth.

The audit also found that the majority of women who were sterilized were between the ages of 26 and 35, and most had a high school reading level. Of the women who received a tubal ligation procedure, which blocks or removes fallopian tubes to prevent pregnancy (one of the only procedures the compensation board previously deemed eligible for reparations), between 2005 and 2013, 50 were white, 47 were Hispanic, and 35 were Black. For most, it was their first time being incarcerated.

The report led California to enact a law in 2014 that explicitly prohibits prisons and jails from performing sterilization procedures for the purpose of birth control. Through organized workshops, letters, emails, and social media posts, advocates had raised awareness about the forced sterilizations and fought for more protections.

“Pressuring a vulnerable population into making permanent reproductive choices without informed consent is unacceptable, and violates our most basic human rights,” said the bill’s author, state Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, in a statement following its passing.

James said that there may be even more women who experienced involuntary sterilizations in prisons who might not have realized it happened to them. Some were told they were having minor procedures like a biopsy only to end up undergoing a full hysterectomy. James says women often underwent sterilization procedures for non-legitimate reasons. 

“They were told they had cancer but they didn’t have cancer, and they were told the only option was a hysterectomy and not offered anything else,” James said. “We will never know how many of those 800 people just from 2005 to 2012, their sterilization happened with proper informed consent and with medical necessity and without any infringements upon people’s autonomy, any coercion.”

Following the law banning sterilization as birth control in prisons, advocates began rallying for reparations for those who already experienced forced and involuntary sterilizations. The California Coalition for Women Prisoners and Justice Now were among some of the advocacy groups that pushed for a compensation program during multiple legislative sessions before it finally passed in 2021. The California Victim Compensation Board (CVCB) began hearing applications in 2022. 

The board is a three-member body currently comprised of Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton, who was selected for the board by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021, State Controller Malia Cohen, who was first elected to her office in November 2022, and Secretary of Government Operations Amy Tong, a Newsom appointee who has led the state agency that oversees the board since early 2022. 

Advocates say they quickly found that the board’s process excluded many women based on the type of sterilization procedure they experienced. 

“They didn’t believe that ablation was part of sterilization,” said Chyrl Lamar, an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners who has been helping some of these women appeal their denials. “This is not fair. Some people had gotten out and were trying to have kids with zero results. They can’t have kids.”

Moore, who represented Buffington in her appeals, said the board’s narrow approach made it difficult for many victims to make claims because prison doctors had used several different procedures to sterilize women besides the ones approved by the board as eligible for compensation. Moore said that advocates and lawmakers explicitly left the definition of a “sterilization procedure” open because of this history. He said they “didn’t want women who were entitled to benefits to be frustrated by the state doing exactly what the state did, which is to say, ‘Well, you had an ablation procedure, but that’s not sterilization.’”

According to CVCB documents, 104 of the 431 people who were denied compensation for their sterilization tried to appeal their denial before the court overturned Buffington’s rejection this summer. Of those appeals, only one was found eligible and the rest of the denials were upheld. 

Since this summer’s court decision, advocates like James and Lamar have been trying to reach currently and formerly incarcerated people to let them know that they have until Jan. 1 to file a letter with the compensation board asking them to consider their case.

Lamar says she regularly receives letters from incarcerated women asking questions about sterilization procedures that they didn’t realize they underwent or confused by the procedure they were coerced into that stripped them of their reproductive freedom. She uses a Global Tel-Link account to message women who have reached out about their sterilizations, and helps them work on their appeals. She said that outside of the women who reach out, it can be difficult to identify others who could benefit from the compensation program and help them.

“The problem is a lot of people have parole, go home, change prisons, so I can only really reach the people that are inside,” Lamar said. “Some of the people have given up.”

James said that she has heard women who experienced sterilizations in prison talk about how traumatizing it is, and the process of having to apply and appeal can add to that pain. She said that many have become discouraged or given up.

“There’s no amount of money that’s enough to compensate for having your organs taken away,” James said, “But I think that for folks who have been able to be compensated, there’s a feeling of legitimation, like this did happen, like this was a harm, and that is really meaningful, in addition to the money being a huge help to folks.”

(This story was updated Dec. 20, 2024 after further comment from California’s victim compensation board.)