Forty years ago, 10 Mexican immigrant women filed a landmark lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Hospital that would help mold Latino civil rights and women's rights movements into what they are today.
A new documentary entitled "No Más Bebés" - which drew acclaim at the Los Angeles Film Festival last summer and will air on PBS in January - tells each woman's story, and reasons L.A. doctors had for sterilizing them without consent. Beyond that, it shows how xenophobia was as prevalent in American society then as it is now.
"No Más Bebés" features interviews from five complainants and their lawyer, Antonia Hernandez, in the historic 1975 Madrigal vs. Quilligan class action lawsuit against Dr. James Quilligan; a county hospital obstetrician accused of forcing poor, non-English speaking patients to be sterilized against their will. A Los Angeles judge sided with the hospital, but the case set off a debate as to what rights women have over their own bodies.
It brought recognition to longstanding, yet unethical, sterilization procedures given to women throughout the 1900s and highlighted what lengths doctors would go to in trying to curve the influx of undocumented immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
"This whole idea of the reproductive justice framework is to make sure that people listen to the needs and the voices of poor women, women of color and immigrant women who've been marginalized," director Renee Tajima-Peña said in an interview with Color Lines. "This film was set during the whole formation of Chicana feminism. It's like the [the women were in a] triple bind; they'd been marginalized within the feminist movement and the Chicano movement."
Tajima-Peña said he choose to make the film on the lawsuit's anniversary because women are still fighting for reproductive rights. Immigrant women and women of color, especially, are still overlooked and neglected.
In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting found California prisons had sterilized nearly 150 women without state approval. Nearly all of them had their tubes tied in violation of prison rules; former inmates and prison advocates said they were targeted because prison medical staff believed they would return to jail in the future.
California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill prohibiting the act a year later. The only exception would be in case of a medical emergency.
One can only wonder if legislations could have been possible without the Mexican women who stood up for themselves some 40 years ago.
"To come out publicly, at a time when Mexican-Americans really had no power in the city, and to talk about being sterilized was really brave," Tajima-Peña said.
"No Más Bebés" is set to air on PBS on Jan. 25, 2016. Watch the documentary's trailer below.