remained were heroes indeed.
Anti-abortion advocates also labeled abortion rights as a white people’s cause, which is not the case.
Women of all races were and are divided on the issue, just like men, but black feminists were staunchly in
favor. Blacks have a higher abortion rate than whites, because they have more unintended pregnancies and
because they are poorer, according to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, and in 2012, two-
thirds believed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, despite anti-abortion sermons by some
black ministers. Immigrant Hispanics supported abortion rights in smaller numbers, 41 percent, but among
those born in the United States, 55 to 57 percent agreed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Numerous prominent women of color led in the campaign for abortion rights, including Dr. Helen
Rodríguez-Trias, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, National Council of Negro Women president
Dorothy Height, NOW president Aileen Hernandez, and many more.
Because of the strength of the anti-abortion movement, over the last forty years many feminists had to
devote time and money to defending reproduction rights exclusively. This need to concentrate on a single
issue contributed to the decline of multi-issue feminist organizations. Still, other campaigns to protect
women’s bodily safety gained successes.
One, the movement for free choice in sterilization, won significant victories. About sterilization,
women of different classes had different complaints. When prosperous women sought sterilization,
physicians could arbitrarily refuse their requests on the grounds that they were too young or hadn’t yet had
“enough” children (on the assumption that physicians knew better than the women what was in their best
interest), while poor women, and particularly people of color, had been frequently subjected to
involuntary sterilization—a practice used since early in the twentieth century. State authorities could
threaten to cut women off welfare if they did not agree to be sterilized, or get them to sign consent forms
at moments of painful labor and delivery. One egregious case gave the widespread practice publicity in
1973: Alabama authorities sterilized Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, African Americans aged fourteen
and twelve, not only without consent but without even their or their mother’s knowledge, on the grounds
that they were “at risk” of early sexual activity. The National Welfare Rights Organization and the
women’s movement protested loudly enough to get a federal investigation into what were widely known
as “Mississippi appendectomies.”
Latinas were in the lead in this campaign. In the mid-1970s in Los Angeles, ten low-income, Mexican-
origin women filed suit against obstetricians who had coerced them into sterilization within hours of
giving birth. Their stories showed the abuse clearly: Helena Orozco testified that a “doctor said that if I
did not consent to the tubal ligation that the doctor repairing my hernia would use an inferior type of
stitching material which would break the next time I became pregnant, but that if I consented to the tubal
ligation that the stitches would hold as proper string would be used.” Jovita Rivera testified that “while I
was in advanced labor . . . and in great pain, the doctor told me that I had too many children, that I was
poor, and a burden to the government and I should sign a paper not to have more children . . . that my tubes
could be untied at a later time and I could still have children.”^34 Nevertheless, the judge ruled against
them. They continued to organize and soon found over a hundred similar victims. Sterilization had been
pushed on women in Puerto Rico without informing them of other, temporary birth control methods, and
this was happening in New York as well. Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trias, a Puerto Rican, founded the
Committee to End Sterilization Abuse in New York City in 1973. Then women of the Puerto Rican Young
Lords Party also joined the campaign, which they situated within a larger program for reproductive rights.
Instead of following the nationalist line, that birth control itself was a form of genocide against Puerto
Ricans, the Lords women developed a holistic program calling for reproductive rights, including
abortion, but also including the right to bear children.