11/03/2025
More than 8000 post black women in Mississippi and S. Carolina were given involuntary hysterectomies (removal of uterus) between 1920s and 80s when they went to see white doctors for other complaints.
These came to be known as âMississippi Appendectomiesâ In 1961, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black sharecropper and civil rights activist, entered a Mississippi hospital to remove a benign uterine fibroid tumor. She returned to her familyâs shack on the Marlow plantation to recover, unaware of the life-altering procedure she endured.
While Hamer recovered, unsettling rumors spread in the plantationâs big house. Vera Marlow, the ownerâs wife & cousin of the surgeon who treated Hamer, gossiped to the cook that the surgeon had removed Hamerâs uterus during the procedure, rendering her sterile without consent.
The cook shared the devastating news with others on the plantation, including a woman who was Hamerâs cousin. Through this grapevine, Hamer became one of the last to learn sheâd been forcibly sterilizedâa betrayal that meant she would never have the family she dreamed of.
This horrific practice was so common in the South that it earned a chilling nickname: the âMississippi appendectomy.â It targeted Black women, stripping them of their reproductive rights under the guise of routine medical procedures, often without their knowledge or consent.
3 years later, in 1964, Hamer spoke out in Washington, DC, revealing the scale of the abuse: This was systemic medical violence.
Hamer longed for children, but her choice was stolen from her. Legal action was unthinkable for her in the Jim Crow South. Black women had no power to challenge such abuses at the time.
The âMississippi appendectomyâ was part of a broader eugenics movement in the U.S., which sought to control the reproduction of marginalized groups. From the 1920s to the 1970s, tens of thousands were forcibly sterilized nationwide.
In Mississippi, these procedures were often justified by racist stereotypes that portrayed Black women as hypersexual or unfit to parent. Doctors acted with impunity, supported by a legal system that upheld segregation and denied Black patients autonomy over their own bodies.
