Sterilization laws spread after the Supreme Court approved them in Buck v. Bell in 1927. North Carolina's Eugenics Board sterilized about 7,600 people between 1929 and 1974, many of them poor Black women. California sterilized more than 20,000 people before repealing its law in 1979. In 1973, two Black girls, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, ages 12 and 14, were sterilized in a federally funded clinic in Montgomery, Alabama.
Native women were also targeted. A 1976 Government Accountability Office report found that four Indian Health Service areas sterilized 3,406 women between 1973 and 1976, often with flawed consent forms. In Los Angeles in the 1970s, Mexican American women said they were sterilized during childbirth, which led to the lawsuit Madrigal v. Quilligan.
Abuse continued into this century. California prisons sterilized nearly 150 women between 2006 and 2010 without proper approval. North Carolina in 2013 and California in 2021 created compensation programs for survivors. Reproductive justice advocates name forced sterilization as a core harm the movement fights.