The Unfit Heiress

This book was a bit of a mess of organization, I think. It jumped back and forth in Ann's life and her mother's and then her father's and then back to Ann and it became a confusing jumble that could have been presented more linearly and not lost anything. Also, this book was more about reproductive rights and sterilization than it let on. The last part of the book focused more on the changes in the reproductive rights movement and tried (weakly) to tie it back to Ann's court case. Of course, I do not want to detract from the importance of this story. Ann was subjected to a horrible procedure that changed her life completely without her consent. So did the hundreds of thousands of women of color throughout this time period. It was utterly horrifying to read about how deeply insidious the eugenics movement was in American history and catastrophically impinged on the lives and rights of people of color in the country. One thing that stuck out to me was how some doctors would obtain “consent” for sterilization from Spanish-speaking patients by simply asking “más niños? (More children?) and waiting for the patient to say no so that they could perform what they often misrepresented as a reversible procedure. Anyway, this history is extremely important and ended up playing a large part of this book even though it wasn't necessarily billed as such. So, while the book was a bit of an organized mess, I appreciated the thorough introduction to this terrifying part of American history that, as the end of the book showed, isn't entirely in the past just yet either.