Take My Hand

Take My Hand is a based on true events that happened in July 1973 in Montgomery, Alabama. Young sisters, Mary Alice and Minnie Lee Relf, were sterilized without consent after their illiterate mother, believing the girls were being taken to be given birth control shots, had marked an “X” on the consent form. Filed in federal court by Southern Poverty Law Center, the lawsuit “exposed widespread sterilization abuse funded by the federal government and practiced for decades” (“Relf v. Weinberger; Civ. A. Nos. 73-1557.” Southern Poverty Law Center).

The lawsuit exposed that 100,000 to 150,000 poor people, mostly Black women, were sterilized annually under federally funded programs. In both the fictionalized lawsuit and the historical one, the plaintiffs prevailed; however, the historical case was eventually dismissed when the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) withdrew its existing regulations that supported forced sterilization and agreed to issue new regulations.

The practice of forced sterilization included doctors threatening to terminate women’s welfare benefits or refusing to perform labor and delivery services while the women were in labor unless patients agreed to the procedure. Even after the case was decided and HEW revised its regulations, the practice of sterilization continued, becoming “the most rapidly growing form of birth control in the United States, rising from 200,000 cases in 1970 to over 700,000 in 1980.