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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.”
