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Women of color, especially immigrant women and their bodies have long been a battleground by racist anti-immigrant forces. They have been used as guinea pigs for medical experiments and deemed criminal for daring to migrate with their children, unborn and born.
Last week the Center for New Community released a report detailing the latest front, a connection between a drug used to forcibly sterilize women and the anti-immigrant forces connected to the notorious SB 1070 in Arizona. The Quinacrine Report: Sterilization, Modern-Day Eugenics, and the Anti-Immigrant Movement, details the connections between white nationalist John Tanton, who founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), The Center for Immigration Studies, U.S. Inc., Immigration Reform Law Institute (the source of bills such as Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s HB 56), ProEnglish, U.S. English, and the white-nationalist journal The Social Contract and the development and funding of Quinacrine. The report places current efforts to curb the reproductive rights of immigrant women of color in the context of national forced sterilization efforts impacting at least 65,000 U.S. citizens in U.S. colonies like Puerto Rico and in states like North Carolina that allowed public health officials to sterilize residents, specifically targeting poor black women labeling them as “parasitic and diseased.”
Quinacrine hydrochloride is a drug that was developed in the late 1920s to prevent and treat malaria. Quinacrine was repurposed as a sterilization drug in the 1960s by Chilean researcher Dr. Jaime Zipper who developed Quinacrine pellets that are inserted directly into the uterus, and dissolve into an acid that coats the insides of the fallopian tubes, causing a chemical burn that cauterizes the tubes. The resulting scar tissue leads to the [….]
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