Zaida Sanchez

“Hutton and the ESC advocated the elimination of ‘mental deficients,’ and of races other than ‘intelligent Anglo-Saxons.’”7 In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit, particularly when the mother was “feeble-minded” and “promiscuous.”8 Ten years later, US Public Law 136 legalized all sterilization in Puerto Rico, even for “non-medical” reasons.9 In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge himself wrote, “We found the people of Porto Rico poor and distressed, without hope for the future, ignorant, poverty-stricken and diseased, not knowing what constitutes a free and democratic government.”10”
― Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America's Colony