EDGEWOOD (New Mexico, United States): New Mexico has launched an official investigation into the forced and coerced sterilization of Native American women, focusing on procedures carried out in the 1970s through the Indian Health Service and other providers.
This comes after renewed scrutiny of federal medical practices that lawyers say led to thousands of women undergoing sterilization without proper informed consent. At the center of the inquiry are accounts from Indigenous women who say they were either not fully informed about procedures or were pressured into signing consent forms under distressing circumstances during medical treatment.
One widely cited case involves a Navajo woman who said she underwent emergency surgery in the early 1970s at an Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, New Mexico. She later learned she had been sterilized, a discovery that she said came years after the procedure and had profound personal consequences. Her testimony has been part of broader advocacy efforts pushing for recognition and accountability.
Historical records, including a 1976 US Government Accountability Office review, found that the Indian Health Service performed thousands of sterilizations during the 1970s in multiple service areas. The report also noted that some patients were under 21 and that many consent forms did not meet federal requirements designed to ensure voluntary and informed agreement. Lawyers argue that the limited scope of those reviews means the full scale and impact of the practice has never been fully documented.
Lawmakers in New Mexico have directed the state’s Indian Affairs Department and the Commission on the Status of Women to examine the history and long-term effects of these sterilizations. The investigation will also collect survivor testimony and assess whether similar practices occurred across the state over several decades.
The investigation say it is intended to document harms, create an official historical record, and inform possible future reparative or healing measures. Activists and Indigenous organizations have long argued that coerced sterilization is part of a broader pattern of systemic abuses affecting Native communities, including within federal health systems.
The investigation follows earlier calls from Indigenous activists and physicians who raised concerns in the 1970s about high sterilization rates among Native women. Those warnings contributed to federal scrutiny at the time, but no comprehensive national accounting or formal acknowledgment has been issued.
State officials have indicated the investigation is expected to continue through 2027, reflecting the complexity of gathering testimony and reviewing archival records spanning decades. Survivors and activists have emphasized the need for careful handling of testimony, noting the emotional toll of revisiting traumatic experiences.
The inquiry marks one of the most formal efforts in the United States to revisit allegations of coerced sterilization of Indigenous women at the state level, and it adds to a growing number of initiatives aimed at addressing historical reproductive abuses in institutional care.
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