The forgotten time Ruth Bader Ginsburg fought against forced sterilization

^{Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash}

My mind immediately went to Ruth Bader Ginsburg as I read the breaking news alert. It was not that Justice Ginsburg had died. This news occurred four days earlier, on Monday, after a Georgia nurse had come forward to allege that women detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility were being sterilized without their knowledge by a doctor, paid by the United States government, whom she called “the uterus collector.”

The words of the nurse, Dawn Wooten, made me recall another uterus collector, from another time, and another woman who fought back.

Apart from her legendary dissents on the Supreme Court of the United States, Ginsburg is perhaps best known for the six cases she argued before the court as director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, a position I’m privileged to hold now. In 1973, the year Ginsburg had her first argument before the high court, she and the Women’s Rights Project co-founder, Brenda Feigen, filed a federal lawsuit in North Carolina on behalf of Nial Ruth Cox, a Black...