There are disturbing allegations that a doctor treating women at an ICE-managed immigrant detention center performed an excessive amount of sterilization procedures on women.
The report surfaced when whistleblower Dawn Wooten, a nurse, came forward. As part of a 27-page complaint, Wooten says that undocumented illegal immigrant women living at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia have been unknowingly sterilized. She states that nearly every woman who sees a particular physician is sterilized either through a full hysterectomy or the removal of ovaries, without the patient’s full understanding or consent.
“We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out,” Wooten said in the complaint. “That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly… is he collecting these things or something… Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out.”
For example, one young woman came to him needing one of her fallopian tubes removed due to a cyst. He removed the wrong one and had to do the procedure again and she ended up undergoing a full hysterectomy.
Wooten said, “She still wanted children — so she has to go back home now and tell her husband that she can’t bear kids… she said she was not all the way out under anesthesia and heard him [the doctor] tell the nurse that he took the wrong ovary.”
Reportedly, many of the women did not know or did not understand, due to the language barrier, what was happening.
While the women did have medical issues necessitating a clinical visit, Wooten explained, “Everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”
If these reports are accurate, it is a concerning development and one that should be addressed as quickly as possible.
While it is necessary to evaluate those that are coming into this country illegally, sterilization should not be a standard part of that process.
In a statement, ICE said that it would begin investigating the situation. “That said, in general, anonymous, unproven allegations, made without any fact-checkable specifics, should be treated with the appropriate skepticism they deserve.”
There are also allegations from the immigrants being detained that they have been the subject of medical experiments.
Throughout the years, there have been reports from a variety of prisons in the United States that women are being coerced or forced to undergo sterilization after being told the procedure can minimize their prison sentences or secure early releases. This type of coercion is based on eugenic principles and should never be occurring in the United States, under any situation.
The Daily Citizen will continue to monitor this story and bring updates as they become available.
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