By:
Dave Kingsley
- On July 30, 1943, Marie-Louise Girard was the last woman guillotined in France. Her crime: assisting women with abortion. Many of the women she was helping had been raped by Nazi occupiers. A 1988 movie, Story of Women, dramatizes her life.
- Between 1908 and the present time, approximately 400,000 U.S. residents have been forcibly sterilized by state and federal government bureaucracies. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of state sterilization laws in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, Superintendent 274 U.S. 200. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion in which he stated the following: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Buck v. Bell is still extant case law – it has never been overturned. The state of Oregon carried out a state ordered sterilization in 1981. Over the past few decades evidence of involuntary hysterectomies and tubal ligations carried out on ICE detainees and women prisoners in the California prison system has been consistently surfacing.
- Louisiana House Bill 813, which has cleared the Louisiana House Committee on Criminal Justice by a vote of 7 to 2, defines abortion as homicide, which would carry a penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Critics of the legislation have argued that the bill will even outlaw use of IUDs as a contraceptive.
- Aging prisoners have been the fastest growing demographic in the vast U.S. prison system. Human Rights Watch estimates that the age 65 or older inmate population grew an astonishing 94 times faster than the total sentenced prisoner population between 2007 and 2010. The older prison population increased by 63 percent, while the total prison population grew by 0.7 percent during the same period.
Source: (https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/01/27/old-behind-bars/aging-prison-population-united-states).