EDGEWOOD, New Mexico – In the 1970s, the U.S. agency providing health care to Native Americans sterilized thousands of women without their full and informed consent, depriving them of the opportunity to start or raise families.
Decades later, the state of New Mexico is preparing to investigate this troubling history and its lasting damage.
New Mexico lawmakers this week approved a measure requiring the state Department of Indian Affairs and the Commission on the Status of Women to examine the history, scope and impact of forced and forced sterilizations of women of color by the Indian Health Service and other providers. The results are expected to be presented to the governor by the end of 2027.
“It is important for New Mexico to understand the atrocities that have occurred within our state borders,” said State Sen. Linda Lopez, one of the sponsors of the legislation.
It is not the first country to confront its past. In 2023, Vermont launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to study forced sterilization of marginalized groups including Native Americans. In 2024, California began paying compensation to people who were sterilized without their consent in state-run prisons and hospitals.
The New Mexico Legislature also laid the groundwork for the creation of a separate healing commission and for official recognition of a little-known part of history that haunts indigenous families.
This is long overdue, said Sarah Derr, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law.
“Women in these communities carry these stories,” she said.
With the exception of a 1976 U.S. Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has never acknowledged what Deere calls a campaign of “systematic” sterilizations in Native American communities.
The Indian Health Service and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment on the investigation in New Mexico.
In 1972, Jane Whitehorse was admitted to an Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, New Mexico, with a ruptured appendix. Whitehorse, a 22-year-old and new mother, said she remembers experiencing “extreme pain” when providers presented her with a set of consent forms before rushing her into emergency surgery.
“The nurse held the pen in my hand. I just signed on the line,” said Whitehorse, a Navajo Nation.
A few years later, when she was struggling to have a second child, Whitehorse said she returned to the hospital and learned she had undergone a tubal ligation. She said the news devastated Whitehorse, contributed to the breakdown of her relationship and pushed her into alcoholism.
Advocates have already been sounding the alarm about women like Whitehorse who enter IHS clinics and hospitals to give birth or for other procedures, and later find themselves unable to become pregnant. The activist group Women of All Red Nations, or WARN — an offshoot of the American Indian Movement — was formed in part to expose the practice.
In 1974, Choctaw and Cherokee physician Connie Redbird Urey reviewed IHS records and claimed that the federal agency sterilized up to 25% of its patients of reproductive age. Some of the women Uri interviewed were not aware they had been sterilized. Others said they were bullied into consenting or were misled into believing the procedure could be undone.
Urey’s allegations helped prompt the Government Accountability Office’s audit, which found that the Indian Health Service sterilized 3,406 women in four of the agency’s 12 service areas between 1973 and 1976, including in Albuquerque. The agency found that some of the patients were under 21 and that most of them signed forms that did not comply with federal regulations meant to ensure informed consent.
GAO researchers concluded that interviewing women who had undergone sterilization procedures “would not be productive,” citing one study of New York heart surgery patients who struggled to remember previous conversations with doctors. Because of the lack of patient interviews and the narrow scope of the GAO audit, advocates say the full scope and impact remain unknown.
Whitehorse hasn’t shared her experience in nearly 40 years, she said. First she told her daughter. Then another family.
“Every time I tell my story, it alleviates the shame and guilt,” Whitehorse said. “Now I think, why should I be ashamed? It is the government that should be ashamed of what it did to us.”
Whitehorse now publicly advocates for victims of forced sterilization. In 2025, she testified about the practice before the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and called on the United States to formally apologise.
Whitehorse hopes New Mexico’s investigation will give more victims a place to tell their stories. But advocates like Rachel Lorenzo, executive director of the Albuquerque-based sexual and reproductive health organization Indigenous Women Rising Up, say the commission must be careful to avoid re-traumatizing survivors across generations.
“It’s a taboo topic. There’s a lot of support that needs to happen when we tell these painful stories,” Lorenzo said.
At a legislative hearing in New Mexico earlier this month, retired Indian Health Service physician Dr. Donald Clark testified that he saw female patients in their 20s and 30s “looking for contraception but not confident that they will not be irreversibly sterilized” because of stories quietly passed down by their grandmothers, mothers and aunts.
“This is still an issue that affects women’s choice of birth control today,” Clark said.
The 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell upheld states’ rights to sterilize people they deemed “unfit” to reproduce, paving the way for forced sterilization of immigrants, people of color, the disabled, and other disadvantaged groups throughout the twentieth century.
According to Lorenzo and Dear, the sterilization of Native American women fits into a pattern of federal policies intended to disrupt Native reproductive autonomy, from the systematic removal of Native children to government boarding schools and non-Native foster homes to the Hyde Amendment of 1976, which bars tribal clinics and hospitals that receive federal funding from performing abortions in almost all cases.
In Canada, doctors have been punished until 2023 for sterilizing Indigenous women without their consent.
Deere said New Mexico’s investigation could pave the way for accountability. But without cooperation from the federal government, Deere said the committee’s fact-finding capabilities will be limited.
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