Three months after her daughter’s birth in 1965, 18-year-old Nial Cox Ramirez’s time was up. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina made her choose between signing a form “consenting” to sterilization or terminating welfare for her mother and six siblings.
Informed by anti-Blackness, ableism, classism, and misogyny, the Board believed certain groups were “feebleminded.” Black people in systemic poverty had so-called “high fertility.” A teenager who had become pregnant from rape, Ramirez was deemed “sexually promiscuous.”
In 1973, Ramirez sued. The Board shut down. North Carolina now explicitly bans forced sterilization after sterilizing 7,600 people between 1926 and 1974. Ramirez’s advocacy was bold.
On the day of her sterilization in 1965, Ramirez’s nurses privately offered support but didn’t try to stop the procedure. When she asked the doctor not to sterilize her but to report that he had, he refused. Ramirez understood something: Violence doesn’t just happen. It’s a choice requiring active and passive participation. “If I was a doctor, I would say ‘No, I’m not going to do that,” she reflected decades later. “This is a young girl ... Why would I do that to her?’”
Today, 30 states still legally allow forced sterilization. Trump’s “preoccupation with ‘good genes’” could foreshadow a return of sterilization abuse. Still, we have agency. From small, daily moments to big, collective actions, how can you refuse to silently witness or participate in systemic violence?