Film Description

More than one-third of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age have been sterilized. So common the procedure that it is simply called la operacion. In this documentary expose, the personal testimony of sterilized women is conjoined with newsreels, excerpts from government propaganda films and interviews with doctors, birth-control specialists and politicians to unmask the controversial use of sterilization as a tool of social policy. Begun in the 1930s as a means of curbing the "surplus population" and reinforced in subsequent decades, the sterilization of women was tied to America's interventionist economic policies. Women were encouraged to undergo this "fashionable" procedure without being informed about the operation or its consequences. When the jobs promised by the 1950s Operation Bootstrap program failed to materialize, the campaign for female sterilization intensified. In the 1960s Puerto Rican women were used as guinea pigs in the development of the birth control pill. Using data derived from these experiments, the U.S. Agency for International Development promoted sterilization and birth control in developing nations to prevent revolutions troublesome to multinational corporations. More recently, Puerto Rico's dependence on welfare subsidies has caused political leaders to recommend sterilization, a procedure that has also been urged among minority women in the South Bronx.