Kamala Harris Did Not Stand up for Reproductive Rights
Harris had a golden opportunity to prosecute the doctor behind the California Prison sterilization cases, but did nothing.
Abortion is once again rearing its ugly head in an election, and VP Kamala Harris is being crowned as a crusader for women’s “Reproductive freedom.” Her actual legacy as California’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2017 tells a very different - and darker - story.
As AG, her office ignored, then covered up, then failed to prosecute what should have been one of the biggest “reproductive freedom” scandals in recent memory: the California State Prison system’s secret involuntary sterilization program under eugenicist doctor James C. Heinrich targeting mostly Black women.
The scandal broke in 2014 when black investigative journalist Corey Johnson ran a major expose for the now-defunct Center for Investigative Journalism in Emeryville. After the California State Prison system went into federal receivership in 2006, the feds engaged Dr. James Heinrich to oversee gynecology for women at Valley State Prison. Between 2006 and 2010 at least 132 tubal ligations were performed on women with more than 2/3 of the referrals coming from Heinrich, who continued to treat women until 2012. Valley State had six times the number of sterilization procedures of other women’s prisons.
These were, however, just the overt sterilization procedures. It has since come to light that Heinrich ordered at least 80 “endometerial ablations” after informing women they had abnormal pap smears. The women were not informed the procedure has a sterilizing effect, and is performed to stop irregular menstrual bleeding, not to prevent cervical and uterine cancer. In addition, he ordered 289 hysterectomies and ovary removals, allegedly for cancer prevention purposes. Request for Procedure records obtained by KQED indicate Heinrich routinely failed to substantiate any medical need for these procedures. A 2013 audit only released in 2014 by lesbian California State Auditor Elaine Howell found Heinrich never signed informed consent forms, ignored federal rules requiring a 30-day waiting period between consent and sterilization procedures, and failed to have “ablation” procedures approved by the required two committees of medical staff from the federal receiver’s office.
All the evidence indicates that through 2010 Heinrich was mass sterilizing female inmates against their will and against their knowledge. Journalist Corey Johnson got Heinrich on the record stating that the reason procedures did not follow the required levels of review is that the money spent was minimal, “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children, as they procreated more” - practically a confession.
Prior to Kamala Harris assuming office, the California AG’s office got wind of the problem and secretly settled a malpractice case related to Heinrich’s care. Eyes at the AG’s office had been on his practices since at least 2008, and Heinrich admitted in a deposition he would eat food while seeing patients, one of whom died from an infection. Such depositions and stipulations were sealed. The federal receiver’s office stated it first became aware of the sterilizing procedures in 2010, and the State Audit noted they declined dramatically after that year. Federal examiners should have known there was a problem before that. In 2007, they had been sent to investigate the deaths of two newborns who died in childbirth because Heinrich gave each mother the wrong prenatal medicine.
Very probably, the feds simply inherited the program when it went into state receivership. In 2001 at age 24 a black woman named Kelli Dillon was sterilized when she unknowingly had a hysterectomy. All she was told was that she needed surgery to remove an ovarian cyst (although it’s unclear if she ever had such a cyst). She sued the state in 2006, eventually losing her case in 2012 under Harris’s tenure where the new AG had an opportunity to settle.
It appears the policy was to tacitly accept the sterilization program until it came to the attention of higher-ups at the federal receiver’s office in 2010 when it was quietly made to go away except malpractice lawsuits got it into the public domain sufficiently to attract the attention of a state legislator who ordered a state audit in 2013 of sterilization procedures across the prison system, which was enough to spur Corey Johnson’s bombshell reporting. So, by 2014, Attorney General Harris was handed on a silver platter a potential case and potential investigation to allow her to become the crusader for Black women’s reproductive freedom the press today wants her to be.
Instead - Kamala did nothing.
All that happened is the case was referred to the California Medical Board, which did … nothing. Heinrich retired without discipline. No investigation was performed by the AG, the Federal Receiver, the Medical Board, . Heinrich died at age 80 in January 2024 with no press mention. Claims by 188 black women for reparations funded by the state legislature were rejected.
Normally, the California Attorney General has a duty to defend state officials even when they are bad actors, but in this case, Heinrich was working for the federal receiver. This was Kamala Harris’s golden opportunity to call attention to Black Women’s reproductive freedom against the backdrop of state eugenics where over 20,000 women were sterilized under a law that became the model for Nazi Germany and was praised by Hitler. Who is to know what dark secrets of the prison medical complex would have been unearthed if Kamala Harris’s AG’s office had pursued an investigation as aggressively as it had pursued with Backpage - a prosecution that enabled sex trafficking and injured women.