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

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 prisons, state-run hospitals and homes.

Her case could have wide-ranging implications for other people who were sterilized by the state and whose applications for the 2021 reparations program were rejected by the California Victim Compensation Board on technicalities.

The board four times denied Buffington’s applications for a $35,000 reparations payment, writing that ablations don’t qualify as sterilizations under the law because the procedure “was performed to treat her underlying medical condition” and “does not eliminate fertility.”

That all changed when an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled earlier this year that the compensation board wrongfully denied her reparations, stating that “informed consent is a linchpin of the statute.”

In another signal that the program hasn’t lived up to its promise, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 30 signed a law that gives survivors who were previously denied until Jan. 1 to file an appeal. The compensation board has an additional 15 months to consider those appeals and process applications. The program, which was slated to conclude last month, will now end in January 2026.

The compensation board is a state agency that collects restitution and works to compensate victims of crime. It’s overseen by three members: State Controller Malia Cohen; Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton; and a representative from Newsom’s cabinet, Government Operations Secretary Amy Tong.

The agency told CalMatters via an email that its executive officer, Lynda Gledhill, “is unable to give an interview regarding this particular matter as it is pending litigation.”

The email also noted that the agency was “sending letters to all claimants who had documentation available and received denials informing them of their ability to request an additional review of their denial.”

Thousands forcibly sterilized in California institutions

Starting in the early 1900s, more than 20,000 people – disproportionately poor women, people of color and people with disabilities – were involuntarily sterilized in state-run homes and hospitals under California’s eugenics laws. Those laws were repealed in 1979, but the practice continued. A 2014 state audit found that at least 794 people in state prisons underwent various medical procedures that “could have resulted in sterilization” between 2005 and 2013.

The most recent wave of sterilizations were connected to James Heinrich, a doctor who worked at Valley State Prison in Chowchilla. According to state prison medical records obtained by KQED, Heinrich ordered at least 80 ablations between 2006 and 2012. He did not perform the procedure on Buffington.

In 2013, The Center for Investigative Reporting, which first reported the sterilizations, quoted him saying that the state wasn’t paying doctors a significant amount of money for the sterilizations “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more.”

The government agency that oversees prison health care, in a 2014 memo obtained by CalMatters through the California Public Records Act, acknowledged that ablations and dozens of other procedures had “the potential for sterilization or diminished capacity for future conception.” Those procedures, the memo stated, must go through a heightened level of review “effective immediately.” It was sent to top prison health care officials just three months before the state concluded its audit on forced sterilization in California prisons.

“They knew we were coming,” said Hannah-Beth Jackson, the former state senator who requested the state audit. “I think that memo was clearly in response to either what they knew was going on, or what they needed to do in order to assure that they were covering their rear ends and make sure the doctors and providers understood that indeed, consent was required in advance.”

California in 2021 passed a reparations law carried by Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo to “acknowledge the wrongful sterilization of thousands of vulnerable people,” according to the legislation.

Since then, more than 75% of applicants were denied reparations, according to the compensation board.

Among the applicants who volunteered their demographic information, the majority self-identified as Black or African American. The compensation board approved payments to just 118 applicants as of Oct. 4. KQED and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program previously spoke with six people who had ablations and whose applications were denied by the compensation board. At least four of the ablations were ordered by Heinrich.

Carrillo, a Los Angeles Democrat, acknowledged the rejections and delays during a hearing in August. “For all of the survivors and individuals that still have a pending case: know that you are heard, you are seen, the compensation board cares about what happened to you at a state institution where you have been denied the opportunity to be a parent, to be a mother – that should have been your choice…the compensation board is doing everything it possibly can to ensure that you have an answer to your appeal.”

‘Sterilization is unambiguous’

After the compensation board’s fourth denial of Buffington’s application for reparations, her attorneys, WookSun Hong and John Moore, filed a petition in Alameda County Superior Court arguing that the board’s decision was not based on the law or science. She is one of four survivors to sue the compensation board.

Included in Buffington’s petition was a declaration from Cynthia Chandler, an attorney who helped draft the law and who now works for Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price.

“We collectively and deliberately chose NOT to define or limit the methods of sterilization under which survivors could qualify for compensation as we appreciated that there are many different methods by which reproductive capacity can be destroyed and we did not want to inadvertently exclude a qualifying class from recovery under the compensation program,” wrote Chandler.

Judge Michael Markman on June 25 ruled that the compensation board abused its discretion and interpreted the reparations law too narrowly. He found that an endometrial ablation meets the requirement for compensation because there was no evidence that Buffington gave her informed consent prior to undergoing the procedure.

Additionally, Markman wrote that the online medical source the compensation board relied on to support its justification for Buffington’s denials did “not suggest that fertility is maintained after the procedure.”

He ordered the compensation board to reconsider Buffington’s application “without mistakes of law.” Roughly two months later, the compensation board approved her application.

“The court determined that ‘sterilization’ is unambiguous and is the permanent inability to reproduce,” the compensation board wrote in its decision to release the money. “The court sided with Geynna B. and determined that all procedures that result in sterilization are barred where there is lack of informed consent.”

Last week — four months after the Alameda court ruling in her favor — she received her payment.

“I felt like some justice was being done – that I was being seen,” Buffington said. “That was a terrible thing that happened to us. And it doesn’t deserve to be overlooked.”

Advocates for the survivors commended the court decision and said it’s a first step to opening the door for relief for others who were denied.

“This ruling indicates the need for wide sweeping justice that was not met,” Chandler said.

Will the board release reparations to others?

Today, Buffington works as a certified peer support specialist for people in recovery and an assistant director at Footprints Around the World Inc., a nonprofit organization that serves homeless and low-income families in Los Angeles. She plans to put away the money she received in reparations for her retirement.

“This is one of the cases where an underprivileged person who doesn’t have anything was prejudiced and treated like a number and then set aside,” said Hong, one of her attorneys. “To me, it’s significant that a government agency acknowledged their mistake, but it’s also sad that it took a court order to rectify their mistake.”

Chandler said she’s glad that the court put “a monkey wrench” in the compensation board’s process.

“They were hellbent on denying this claim, I believe, because they know they have failed an entire class of people,” she said. “I hope that this ruling provides some level of precedent to force the compensation board to be accountable.”

The compensation board has not said how it plans to apply the court order to other survivors who were wrongfully denied reparations. Without a new policy in place, advocates have expressed concern that survivors could continue to face barriers to receiving compensation, including time, money and legal resources.

“I’m anxious to know what this means for the hundreds of other survivors who were denied because the state said that the procedure they had was not sterilizing,” said Jennifer James, an associate professor of sociology at UC San Francisco and member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners who has assisted survivors with their applications. “I hope that the compensation board will proactively change their decisions and award them compensation so that they don’t have to seek legal support.”

___

This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.