Used as a means of controlling “undesirable” populations – immigrants, people of color, poor people, unmarried mothers, the disabled, the mentally ill – federally-funded sterilization programs took place in 32 states throughout the 20th century.

Eugenics was a commonly accepted means of protecting society from the offspring (and therefore equally suspect) of those individuals deemed inferior or dangerous – the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, criminals, and people of color.

PBS report

After Puerto Rico was passed from the imperial power of Spain to the United States in 1898, the United States implemented laws and policies targeted at the control of the archipelago’s population. In 1937, neo-Malthusian and eugenic ideology facilitated an amendment to the Puerto Rican penal code, effectively legalizing abortion in the archipelago. This reform enabled the clinical pill trials of contraceptive technologies in the 1940s, to the detriment of working-class Puerto Ricans (Briggs 2003; Preciado 2013; Sánchez-Rivera 2020). Throughout the twentieth century, population control measures saw the forced and coerced sterilization of many Puerto Ricans as a eugenic practice – CULANTH report.