Nashville defense attorneys say prosecutors have offered sterilization to women as a condition to avoid jail time, The Guardian reported.
In the last five years, there have been at least four cases where Nashville prosecutors have made sterilization a part of plea deals with women, including defendants with a history of mental illness and drug use. The procedures were often suggested in a coercive, hush-hush manner.
"It's always been more of 'If your client is willing to do this, then I might be inclined to talk about probation," assistant public defender Joan Lawson, who says her clients have been offered such off-the-record deals, told The Guardian. She said she always made sure to refuse the offer.
One case involved a Minnesota woman named Jasmine Randers whose 5-day-old baby died of unknown causes after she escaped to Tennessee while under court supervision for a mental illness.
Randers, 36, said she woke up at a Nashville motel to find her baby unresponsive, court records said according to The Guardian. She waited two hours before going to a local hospital where the newborn was pronounced dead. Officials were unable to determine a cause of death and the infant's mother was charged with neglect.
According to Randers' lawyer Mary Kathryn Harcombe, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case said he would take prison off the table if Randers was sterilized.
But Harcombe rejected the option and Randers never had the procedure. She was later institutionalized after she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, according to The Guardian.
Harcombe said another client of hers, whose baby tested positive for drugs at birth, was offered the same deal, the Associated Press reported. But the woman refused.
The last two cases also involved women who gave birth to children that tested positive for drugs. But when the invasive procedure was made part of the plea, both women said they already got it done, defense attorney Carrie Seacry, who handled both cases, said according to the AP.
Women being subjected to forced sterilization is not unheard of in American history. A report from the Center for Investigative Reporting found that between 2006 and 2010, some 150 women inmates in California were sterilized, many without giving their lawful consent.
"The history of sterilization in this country is that it is applied to the most despised people- criminals and the people we're most afraid of, the mentally ill- and the one thing that these two groups usually share is that they are the most poor," historian and law professor Paul Lombardo, of Georgia State University, told The Guardian.
"That is what we've done in the past, and that's a good reason not to do it now."
