A Montgomery Tragedy: the Relf Family Refused to be the Nameless Victims of Involuntary Sterilization -Daryl Alexander

I believe that situations like that of the Relf family are the leading motivations behind today’s humanitarians because of the large emotional responses that it can evoke in today’s times.  The vulnerability of the Relf family both directly and indirectly impeded their ability to make and supervise an informed decision for the daughters.  Underlying this large disadvantage and vulnerability was poverty.  Neither of the adults was able to read or write and their poverty placed them under the liability of federal health care.  In addition, their race placed them at an even greater disadvantage in this time.  The sterilization procedures performed on the Relf daughters, two of whom were minors and one of the minors mentally challenged, without explicit and honest consent of neither the children nor the parents of this impoverished, African American family at the mercy of welfare call into question a large number of ethical issues that were raised in the months and years following the case and, strangely enough, are still discussed and disagreed upon between nations of the world. 

Alexander raises the point that “there is a difference between providing information and assistance and coercion and it is a difference which must be zealously guarded.”  So, where do we draw the line between the healthy and just distribution of information and biased encouragement that can lead to authoritarian compulsion?  Well, evidence of exploitation is clear in this situation; the procedures were involuntary and the patients were not aware of the situation.  Besides this, the victims’ status as minor African American women living under the poverty line makes them even more vulnerable.  Why were people seeking to increase the practiced of compulsory sterilization among these populations?

In a time where the fear of population explosion increased by day, many people, most of whom were likely upper class whites, considered sterilization to be an appropriate and effective method of population control.  Now, all needed was a method of selecting people to undergo this procedure.  Naturally, the easiest way was to take the most vulnerable population because they would be the easiest to manipulate.  Also, many considered those who fell under the category of vulnerable to lead lives that included less contribution to the general community and more suffering than average.  Poverty is a general term that is strongly connected to many other social disadvantages, including lack of food, education, and work, and these connections explain the idea of the “cycle of poverty,” which makes it very difficult for impoverished persons to escape their situations.  Preventing this type of life from replicating would actually be doing both potential children and those burdened with their caretaking a favor.   

The ideas and ideologies described here represent different opinions that people in the mid-1900’s possessed about many ethical issues including poverty, race, and compulsory sterilization.  While it can be argued that opinions in the United States today about these kinds of cases are extremely different than the ones presented here, sadly the global community as a whole has yet failed to adopt policies and ideologies that respect what we call human rights.  Eugenics set aside, involuntary sterilization still serves as a form of population control in many places, and the United States must look to the evils of the past to avoid continuation of this unethical practice.