‘Illegal Aliens’, ‘Anchor Babies’, And ‘Mooches’: How does securitising discourse validate the sterilisation of migrant women in the US?

Abstract

In 2020, Dawn Hooten, a licensed practical nurse employed at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility, filed a complaint alleging that inmates were subjected to concerningly high rates of hysterectomies, often without informed consent. However, the coerced and forced sterilisations of women is not a new phenomenon but a pervasive tradition that has disproportionately affected women from minority backgrounds. The continuation of this phenomenon in the US for over fifty years suggests a discursive environment where this practice is, to some extent, legitimised. Consequently, my research question asks how securitising discourse in the US legitimises involuntary sterilisation of migrant women. More specifically, I seek to analyse how conservative U.S. media legitimises the involuntary sterilisation of minority women through its engagement with discriminatory and racialised security narratives. Through post-structural discourse analysis, what I found was three dominant narratives that broadly underpin how conservative U.S. media validates the involuntary sterilisation of migrant women; that migrant women are threats to U.S. national security, racial security and economic security. Each of these themes, with their own interesting sub narratives, assist in securitising migrant women and their reproductive rights and in turn, validate the involuntary sterilisation of these individuals.