why the actual fuck have i heard nothing about this?!!?! this is so horrific and evil. he was only 18 years old, just starting out in life. THIS NEEDS TO BE EVERYWHERE.
If you make it your personality.
Get a therapist! Join a support group! Your friends are not responsible to be your shrink.
Complaining about a bad back or acid reflux all day and not getting medical attention is going to annoy people too.
Actually, NOBODY likes you when you're depressed. Plain and simple. We can talk all day about MENTAL HEALTH and how important it is but the moment you are depressed, people really start to distance themselves.
They see you as NEGATIVE, a BURDEN, and someone too HEAVY to handle.
Did You Know?
The practice of sterilizing poor, Black women by hysterectomy without their knowledge or consent was known as Mississippi Appendectomies. The term emerged because these procedures were so common they were spoken about casually, as if they were routine and harmless. They were neither.
Black women entered hospitals for what they were told were minor procedures—appendectomies, cyst removals, routine care—and left permanently sterilized, often without ever being informed. Attending physicians were paid for these surgeries. Their residents received hands-on surgical practice by performing them on poor Black women and girls whose bodies were treated as expendable.
Freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer was one of countless victims. She entered a Sunflower County, Mississippi hospital believing she was undergoing surgery to remove a cyst. She left without a womb. She did not consent. She was not informed. Like many Black women of her era, her reproductive autonomy was stolen under the guise of medical care.
These abuses occurred throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the very moment Black Americans were organizing for voting rights, civil rights, and economic self-determination. As Black political power increased, systems of control adapted—using medicine, welfare policy, and state authority as tools to limit Black futures.
A landmark court case filed by the on behalf of the Relf sisters, ages 12 and 14, revealed the scale of this violence. The girls were sterilized without their mother’s informed consent, after she was misled into signing documents she could not read. The case exposed how federal funds were being used to support coercive sterilization programs targeting poor Black families.
The case, uncovered that during this period hundreds of thousands of poor Black women and girls were sterilized using government funds. The district court found that an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 poor people were being sterilized annually under federally funded programs. Many were threatened with the loss of welfare benefits, medical care, or housing if they refused to “consent.”
In Illinois, the sterilization by hysterectomy of a 16-year-old Black girl, removed from her father’s care and made a ward of the state, drew national outrage. The procedure was approved based on specious claims of cervical cancer. In response, State Representative publicly charged the state of Illinois with genocide—naming what many had experienced but few had the power to say out loud.
This was not accidental.
This was not isolated.
This was not rare.
This was a system—rooted in eugenics, racism, and economic control—operating through hospitals, courts, and government agencies. It treated Black women’s bodies as problems to be solved rather than lives to be protected.
Black history is not only the story of resistance and triumph.
It is also the truth about what Black people were forced to endure—and why the fight for bodily autonomy, medical ethics, and reproductive justice continues today.
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Learn more (SPLC case summary):
https://t.co/aGQw05t84F
#fannielouhamer #mississippiappendectomies #forcedsterilisation #eugenics #sterilization #hysterectomy