Puerto Rico
What Happened in Puerto Rico?
The documentary La Operacion, created by Ana Maria Garcia, portrays the injustices faced by the women of Puerto Rico at the beginning of the 20th century. The above video contains snippets of the documentary and captures the essence of Garcia’s work. As the United States imposes its colonial power over Puerto Rico, women are sterilized without proper consent at alarming rates in the spirit of countering “overpopulation.” Women in La Operacion express the regret they experience and the recount the deceptive practices of medical providers.
Looking in, it was interesting seeing La Operacion and seeing many of the ways doctors convinced women to become sterilized without informing them of their other options. Also interesting to see how men typically didn’t get sterilized #LATS3
— Erik Flores (@erikfls234) April 16, 2018
As my classmate Erik points out, reproductive rights were stripped primarily from women. Puerto Rican women were at the center of US colonial objectives.
Operation Bootstrap
Operation Bootstrap was the American effort to “modernize” Puerto Rico. The program saw the influx of US corporations into the Puerto Rico, and a shift from farm to industrial labor. While many cite positive outcomes from the program such as longer life expectancy and higher per capita income, the program further encouraged women to leave the household to work and seek sterilization. The structures that supported this had little to no regard for women’s agency.
“A huge array of Puerto Rican modernizing middle-class professionals took up the banner of overpopulation … factories opened under Operation Bootstrap began to employ significant numbers of young women, thereby increasing the pressure on them to limit their fertility” ( pg 122 Reproducing Empire by Laura Briggs)
Above is a 20th century advertisement for contraceptions. Unfortunately, Puerto Rican women were also subject to unethical medical trials of contraceptives. This is yet another case of Puerto Rican women not being able to properly consent to actions which harmed their bodies.
“The truth was that little was known about the drug’s effects when Rock and biologist Gregory Pincus – with the backing of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and philanthropist Katherine McCormick – decided to launch the human trials. The drug had been tested on rats and rabbits, and on a small sampling of women in Rock’s medical practice in Massachusetts. But its largest test would be in Puerto Rico, where as many as 1,500 women took the drug over several years.
Three women in the trials died. But no autopsies were conducted, and so it remains unclear if their deaths were linked to the drug, which was given in much higher doses than it is today.” – Theresa Vargas, The Washington Post