Forced Sterilizations Are America’s Best Kept Secret

October 30, 2020

(Marie Claire) – Over the past decade, award-winning director Erika Cohn has investigated a horrific abuse that’s one of America’s best-kept secrets: forced sterilization. The procedure, considered a form of modern-day eugenics that’s historically been associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, removes a person’s reproductive organs as a form of birth control—without their consent. In her new documentary, Belly of the Beast, Cohn’s reporting takes viewers inside California women’s prisons, where women of color have claimed they were sterilized under false pretenses, misinformed by the doctors and hospitals they were sent to about what was truly going on inside their bodies, and left without choices to preserve their motherhood.