It also officially ended this practice and forced doctors to obtain informed consent before performing sterilization procedures - though as it would turn out, forced sterilizations by state governments would continue into the 21st century. Weinberger, helped reveal that more than 100,000 mostly Black, Latina and Indigenous women were sterilized under U.S. The Relf case would change the course of history: A lawsuit filed on their behalf, Relf v. In the summer of 1973, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice were taken from their home in Montgomery, cut open and sterilized against their will and without the informed consent of their parents by a physician working in a federally funded clinic. They are now 61 and 63 looking at them pressed together as though attached, I could still see the faces of the two young girls forever memorialized a half century ago beneath the headlines “Suit Says Girls Were Sterilized” in The New York Times “Sterilized, Why?” in Time magazine and, in Ebony, “Sterilization: Newest Threat to the Poor.” Mary Alice pulled a chair close to her sister, so they were nestled next to each other as in the Ebony photo and nearly every other photo of the Relf sisters. She pulled me into the house and said something I didn’t quite understand, though after spending time with her, I would come to better comprehend what on that day was a raspy collection of sounds, resulting from a speech impediment and an intellectual disability that make communication difficult for her. When I knocked on the door of the Relfs’ home - a cramped single-story apartment that looks like all the others in the public-housing complex - Mary Alice yanked it open with a big smile, the same one in that picture from 49 years ago. That same picture lay on the passenger seat of my rental car in February 2020 as I turned into the Westport Apartments, a cluster of brick homes situated behind a strip mall near the Mobile Highway in south Montgomery, Ala. The bottom of Mary Alice’s schoolgirl dress is hiked up as she reaches up to rest her right arm, the one that’s not fully formed, a disability she was born with, on her sister’s shoulder. Instead they are pinned down, neat and tidy for the Ebony shoot. The younger Relf sister cracks a big, playful smile, her hair in braids - and not the usual three unruly braids from other pictures of the sisters during this time. ![]() Her left arm is draped around her baby sister, Mary Alice, age 12, anchoring her in place. In a clean white dress with lacy zigzags, she seems ready for Sunday school. Her hair is freshly pressed, hot-curled and brushed into place, making her look older than 14. The older of the two sisters, Minnie Lee, stares hard at the camera, her gaze direct and unsmiling but pleasant, almost quizzical. It’s from a 1973 issue of Ebony magazine. I keep a sepia-tone photograph of the Relf sisters folded up and tucked in my wallet.
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