James Heinrich, the doctor performing an ultrasound on an unknown inmate
The black Stork movie advertisement in a newspaper. showing in the Oliver Theater on November 13th, 1917. Picture of Harry J Haiselden, a famed eugenics doctor.
Doctor James Heinrich, Picture gotten from a Family photo
James Heinrich, the doctor performing an ultrasound on an unknown inmate
MODERN DAY EUGENICS
“We don’t allow dogs to breed. We spay them. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children….’,
Barbara Harris, Founder of Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity(Washington)
Over his 5-year tenure until December 2012, over 100 female patients were sterilized by James Heinrich through tubal ligations. Most of these operations were performed nonconsensual as well as without proper due process; physician signature and waiting period violations(Johnson). A long list of controversies and expensive malpracitice lawsuits both in and out of the prison did not keep him out even as a federal judge requured the prison to 'clean up'. He retired in 2011, and was rehired as a contractor until December 2012. Following more of his victims speaking out, he was barred from further prison work.
His actions were eerily similar to other medical eugenicists such as Harry Haiselden and John Kellog with their deeply rooted racial biases. In the wake of discriminatory legislation and over-policing, black America is overrepresented in the incarcerated population. Despite being 7.8% of the US population, black women are 13% of the incarcerated population, and in California, where James Heinrich was licensed, reaching as high as 26%(Budd).
Most of his victims were previously pregnant 5 or more times, and only one-third had a reading proficiency above the 6th grade. Heinrich previously stated that money spent on tubal ligations was nothing “compared to what you save on welfare paying for these unwanted children”, a sentiment mirrored by Barbara Harris, the founder of CRACK, later renamed Project Prevention; a group paying addicts off the street to get
sterilized, 20 years prior.
Sources;
Budd, Kristen M. “Incarcerated Women and Girls.” The Sentencing Project, 26Aug. 2024,www.sentencingproject.org/fact-sheet/incarcerated-women-and-girls/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20the%20imprisonment%20rate,white%20women%20rose%20by%2018%25.
Johnson, Corey G. “California Finds Illegal Sterilizations of Female Inmates .” SFG
News, Hearst Communication, 20 June 2014,
www.sfgate.com/news/article/State-finds-illegal-sterilizations-of-female-5565855
.php.
Washington, Harriet A.. Medical Apartheid : The Dark History of Medical
Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utsa/detail.action?docID=6101226.
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