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A New Booklet Seeks to End Reproductive Injustices Behind Bars

The authors want to inform people in women’s prisons about their rights. “There’s no way to survive in there unless we know what our rights are.”

A woman reads a book while in the infirmary at at Las Colinas Women’s Detention Facility in Santee, California.

Aminah Elster recalls being told to avoid the gynecologist to protect her uterus. It wasn’t an idle warning. In different yards across California’s women’s prisons, people advised one another to avoid the gynecologist, warning that he wanted to “take their wombs.”

Between 2005 and 2013, over 850 people in California women’s prisons were sterilized. Many were not told beforehand that the procedure would leave them unable to have children.

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This includes Ezekiel Teaque. While at Valley State Prison for Women, gynecologist James Heinrich told him that he had a cyst on his left ovary and recommended removing the entire organ. Seven years later, Heinrich told Teaque that he had a cyst on his remaining ovary. At the hospital, Teaque received some confusing news—the surgeon told him that his right ovary had already been removed. He never received documentation confirming whether he still had one ovary or if both had been removed. (Valley State converted to a men’s prison in 2013. Heinrich no longer works for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.) 

Robbin Machuca was told by a different prison gynecologist that she had a cyst on her ovary and needed surgery to correct it. “I was young.… I didn’t know about insides and stuff like that,” she told The Nation. She consented to the procedure and later learned that she had been sterilized. 

These sterilizations made headlines and sparked outrage. In 2021, after years of advocacy, the state agreed to pay $4.5 million to nearly 800 people in its women’s prisons who had undergone procedures that “could have resulted in sterilization.” 

But people in women’s jails and prisons face routine reproductive injustices every day, most of which go unnoticed. And there are a series of factors that allow these injustices to continue.

Behind bars, accurate medical information is hard to come by. Providers may not explain conditions or procedures. Incarcerated patients often do not know that they can ask for more information, ask for more time before making a decision, or say no to a proposed procedure. That’s what happened to Teaque, a Black trans man who entered prison in his early twenties.

“Back then, I never thought a doctor would lie to me,” Teaque, now 54, told The Nation. 

Machuca recalled thinking similarly at the time. “I trusted them because it was their field of duty,” she said. 

Now, both Machuca and Teaque are part of an inside-outside research........

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