I’ve been seeing this link all over my facebook feed–thought I’d pass it on here. It’s an incredibly important and devastating article about the sterilization program in Puerto Rico that the US funded and the Puerto Rican government supported.

Eugenics is defined as the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding. Puerto Rico has the highest rate of female sterilization in the world. By 1965, thirty-five percent of Puerto Rican women ages 20-49 had been coerced into irreversible sterilization as part of a government campaign to control the growing number of the islands poor and working class population. This mass eugenics program was funded by the U.S. and fully supported by the Puerto Rican government from the 1930s through the late 1970s. Government propaganda made the procedure so common place that it became known simply as “la operacion.”

The original link comes with video testimonios of survivors.