No Más Bebés tells the story of a little-known, but landmark event of women’s history and reproductive rights, a struggle that unfolded four decades ago in Los Angeles. The film recounts how a small group of mothers and activists sued county doctors, the state, and the U.S. government after they were sterilized while giving birth at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center during the late 1960s and 1970s. Many of the mothers spoke no English, and charged that they had been forced to consent to having their fallopian tubes tied by doctors and nurses during the late stages of labor — often based on little more than the question “More babies?”
This documentary illustrates how Latina women were seminal in framing the contemporary discourse around reproductive justice.
Additionally, the film will be available for FREE viewing via pbs.org for 2 weeks, starting the day after the broadcast premiere, from February 2 – 16, 2016.
No Más Bebés producer, VIRGINIA ESPINO is a historian at the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, and has conducted oral histories with major figures in the Latina/o community. Her research on coercive sterilization at LACMC provided the basis for the documentary project. Espino has been published in Las Obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, edited by Vicki L. Ruiz, and Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. She has served on the California Commission for Sex Equity, and the Los Angeles Chicano/Latino Education Committee. She is married to Hector Tobar, the acclaimed author of “Deep Down Dark” the story of the Chilean miners as well as other titles. In late 2015, Los Angeles’ Centro de Niño’s celebrated the Espino and Tobar family as their “family of the year,” read more, here: http://www.centrodeninos.com/events-and-activities.html
“Like most middle class women, to me Roe v. Wade meant the right to abortion,” says producer/director Renee Tajima-Peña. “I never considered I would ever be denied the choice to have a baby. Today there is a growing reproductive justice movement that argues for a woman’s control over the full range of her fertility — the right to terminate a pregnancy as well as the right to have a child and raise that child in dignity. Forty years ago, these women were talking about reproductive justice in a way that was ahead of their time. They understood that their race, poverty, and legal status affected whether or not they had any choice at all.”
40 years after the groundbreaking lawsuit addressing the unwanted sterilization of Mexican immigrant women at a Los Angeles County Hospital the film
No Más Bebés from director Renee Tajima-Pena and producer Virginia Espino premieres on public television’s Independent Lens documentary series, on
Monday, February 1, 2016. (Check local listings at
http://www.pbs.org/)