Editing Amerindian Genocide (section)

====Forced sterilization====
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian Health Service performed thousands of sterilizations on Native American women between the ages of 15 and 44, with 3,406 women being sterilized between 1973 and 1976. Most of these sterilizations were performed without informed consent, with the women being either tricked into thinking the process was reversible, blackmailed into consenting with threats of losing welfare or simply forced to undergo the procedure with no prior knowledge. This was part of a wider policy of [[eugenics]] which also included African-Americans and the poor. It was halted in 1976 when the General Accountability Office found the sterilizations to be noncompliant with IHS ethics and policy and declared a moratorium on all sterilization procedures.

A similar policy was pursued in several Canadian provinces in the 1930s, where Native women were declared to be mentally incompetent and were sterilized under the direction of the provincial Boards of Eugenics.