Dolen Perkins-Valdez's third novel is historical fiction inspired by the 1973 Relf case, in which two young sisters, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, were surgically sterilized without informed consent at a federally funded clinic in Montgomery, Alabama. Perkins-Valdez renames and reimagines the story through Civil Townsend, a young Black nurse fresh out of Tuskegee who takes a job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic intending to help women control their own reproductive lives. Her patients India and Erica Williams, eleven and thirteen, poor Black girls who have never been sexually active, are first put on experimental Depo-Provera injections and then, after their illiterate father is maneuvered into signing a form he cannot read, sterilized. Civil, who carries her own history of a terminated pregnancy, helps bring a lawsuit that expands into a challenge to the federal sterilization program itself. A frame narrative set decades later follows the older Dr. Townsend, retired and raising the question of what apology and repair can mean so long after the fact. Published by Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in April 2022, the novel won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work — Fiction and remains a central recent fictional treatment of reproductive coercion in the United States.
Author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez · Original publisher: Berkley (New York), 2022
