Sterile judgment: Sacramento woman’s dismissed allegations recall California’s shameful eugenics past

The accusation sounds like a horror-show medical conspiracy—a Catholic hospital illegally harvested the reproductive organ of a Sacramento woman as part of a nationwide healthcare industry campaign to sterilize minority women.

On December 20, a jury agreed there was virtually no evidence to support Suzanne Brooks’ claims against Mercy San Juan Medical Center in an almost unanimous ruling in Sacramento Superior Court. As resounding as the jury decision was, what Brooks insists happened to her has been proven elsewhere—and evokes a shameful era in California that refuses to stay dormant.

According to court documents and an interview with Brooks, who has dabbled in music, poetry and activism over the past three decades, it all started more than four years ago, on October 16, 2012. That’s when she went to Mercy San Juan in Carmichael, operated by Mercy Medical Group, to get a cyst removed.

Prior to the surgical procedure, Brooks says she consented to have her left ovary removed if medically necessary. Brooks, who is black, alleges that a nurse attempted to coerce her into consenting to have her right ovary removed as well. “In my case, the nurse tried to bully me into signing a consent form that was not correct,” Brooks told SN&R.

Brooks also claims that her medical records had been tampered with. Her attorney Carol Treasure says the records were not presented at trial due to a legal requirement that they be presented by a medical expert.

According to motions filed by Treasure, Brooks’ physician, Dr. Wiley Fowler, ended up extracting the cyst, left ovary and more. Brooks says Fowler cut out her right ovary without her consent during the procedure. She also claims the surgeon told her he also removed her left fallopian tube, which Brooks says already had been taken out 30 years prior, along with her uterus.

Brooks filed her lawsuit in 2013 after both the ACLU and NAACP declined to take her case. Last month, a jury ruled 11-1 in Fowler’s favor. The lone dissenter, both Brooks and Fowler’s attorney confirmed, was a woman of color.

Though Fowler’s attorney, Bruce E. Salenko, said he couldn’t speak to Brooks’ allegation that nonconsensual ovary removal is an actual phenomenon, he said the facts in this case were unequivocal. “The medical evidence in the case clearly established that he did not do that,” Salenko said of his client. “There were five experts that testified to that effect.”

The testifying medical experts included a urologist, a gynecological surgical expert, a pathologist, a radiologist and Fowler himself.

“They testified that unquestionably what Dr. Fowler did was remove the correct ovary, and that the other ovary was in fact not removed and was absent at the time of the surgery,” Salenko added. “It is contrary to what [Brooks] has expressed in this case, and it is contrary to the facts of this case. She is spreading a factual falsehood about Dr. Fowler.”

Salenko declined to speculate what would motivate Brooks to do such a thing, saying his concern was with proving his client’s innocence.

Brooks, who identified herself to SN&R as a co-chair of the Justice Reform Coalition Medical Advocates Group, formed “to advocate for medical patient rights and address medical malfeasance,” according to its website, is vowing to appeal the ruling.

Brooks, who gave her age as over 65, says she wasn’t necessarily concerned about the surgery leaving her sterile, as she considers herself past childbearing age. But she says she objected to the alleged violation of her bodily autonomy, the effects she claims the disputed procedure has had on her hormone activity and the larger implications she contends it posed for women of color.

Regarding the latter, Brooks asserted her belief that nonconsensual sterilizations occur throughout the country on a yearly basis. Her fellow JRC member, Rev. Ashiya Odeye, said he also believes there is a systematic medical conspiracy against women of color to harvest their ovaries, “for science.” Brooks suggested the alleged harvesting may have something to do with in-vitro fertilization, but neither she nor Odeye could provide details or evidence to document their claims.

It should be noted that Mercy Medical Group, a service of the Catholic-affiliated Dignity Health network and the state’s largest hospital network, is ideologically opposed to IVF and sterilization. In August 2015, for instance, a Mercy hospital in Redding agreed to perform a postpartum tubal ligation only after the ACLU threatened to sue the hospital for denying a doctor’s request to perform the procedure. In a release from that time, the ACLU noted that the hospital’s directives, written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, classify common reproductive health procedures as “intrinsically evil.”

Brooks’ allegations are not without real-life precedent, however: In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting uncovered the illegal sterilizations of 148 female inmates at the California Institution for Women in Corona and Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla between 2006 and 2010.

Brooks’ case also recalls an ugly period in 20th century history, when California led the country in government-sponsored involuntary sterilizations, conducting more than 20,000 before 1964, according to the University of Vermont and Sacramento State’s Center for Science, History, Policy, and Ethics.

The so-called eugenics movement has throttled back into the present tense, thanks to the work of a University of Michigan professor who is trying to identify any surviving victims and has called for the state to pay reparations to them and their survivors.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated from a previous version that incorrectly reported that Mercy Medical Group is owned by the Roman Catholic Church. SN&R regrets the error.