Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor Highlight

Her case set a precedent through which the state was able to sterilize thousands more “undesirable” people, predominantly the disabled, sex workers, Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color. In 1961, civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer, a disabled Black woman, was forcibly sterilized without her knowledge; the procedure was so common at the time that it had its own nickname, the “Mississippi appendectomy.” Buck v. Bell has never been overturned.