‘I would have been a great mom’: California finally pays reparations to woman it sterilized

By Cayla Mihalovich (CALMATTERS) – Geynna Buffington knew she had little time to become pregnant once she was released from prison at age 40. For over a year, she tried to have a baby. She didn’t know pregnancy would be unlikely because of a procedure she had nearly a decade earlier. In 1998, while Buffington was incarcerated at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, she underwent an “endometrial ablation” in order to treat what a prison doctor had told her was an abnormal pap smear. The procedure destroys the uterine lining and should not be done for people who have any desire for future childbearing, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. But Buffington was not told how the procedure would affect her fertility. “That is so humanly low for someone to make the decision that I don’t deserve to have children because I’m incarcerated,” said Buffington, 58. “I would have been a great mom.” Buffington this month finally received recognition that the state robbed her of her reproductive freedom. Securing that acknowledgment came only after a long court battle to make her eligible for California’s historic reparations program for people who were forcibly sterilized while in state...