Belly of the Beast contains such an atrocity of state-sanctioned abuse against women’s bodies, it could be a horror film. But no, this is a documentary anchored to the real-life experience of Kelli Dillon, who was sterilised without consent while serving time at Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF).
Dillon is one of thousands (mostly women of colour) whose right to bear children was taken away from them, a choice denied under the insidious twin veil of paternalism and public interest. Let’s outline what happened to her so you can appreciate the degree of violation.
In 2001, while serving a 15-year sentence for killing her abusive husband in self-defence, Dillon began experiencing abdominal pains. A doctor, suspecting ovarian cysts, ordered a biopsy. After the procedure, Dillon started having heart palpitations and night sweats. Her periods stopped. What she didn’t know is that this doctor had also taken out her ovaries.
Fast forward to 2012 and Dillon was working on gang intervention and domestic violence cases with human rights organisation Justice Now when she met director Erika Cohn, who was volunteering as a legal advocate for women prisoners in California. Cohn had got involved two years earlier after meeting Justice Now co-founder, attorney and activist Cynthia Chandler.
It was here that Belly of the Beast’s activist axis took shape. At first, Dillon was asked to be an adviser on the film but it soon became clear to Cohn that her story was key. She asked to document Dillon preparing to give evidence at an anti-sterilisation bill hearing.
Then older footage was discovered, which dramatically changed the structure and weight of the piece. Seeing a young Dillon giving her deposition at the beginning, so vulnerable, traumatised – “Can I hope?” she asks her interviewer – immediately draws in the viewer. As do the POV shots in prison reconstructions which place us in intimate, confined and uncomfortable spaces. Unaware of, and yet dreading, what‘s about to happen.
The film follows Chandler and the Justice Now team as they try to build a case around Dillon, uncovering the full extent of this abuse of power along the way. One of the biggest revelations is how this practice was intertwined with eugenics for so many years in California, a state that planted the seed for Nazi Germany’s purification programme.
Throughout most of the 20th Century, California led the country in the number of sterilisation procedures performed on men and women deemed “unfit to produce”, often without their full knowledge and consent. Approximately 20,000 sterilisations took place – that’s one third of the total in 32 states where such action was legal.
According to the Guardian, “the program disproportionately targeted the Latino community, women, people with disabilities and impairments – even those who had children out of wedlock. The mean age of victims was 17, and they included children as young as 12.”
The infamous 1927 Supreme Court Case of Buck v Bell set the tone (and a precedent) for forced sterilisation, as well as ableism and other forms of systemic discrimination. Carrie Buck was deemed “feebleminded” and “promiscuous”, traits believed to have been inherited from her mother. The reality was that her foster mother’s nephew had taken advantage of her and she became pregnant.
Carrie was sterilised at 21. Endorsing the procedure in his opinion, Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes said “society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind”. (Carrie’s sister was also sterilised without consent after complaining of appendicitis and did not find out until her late 60s.)
In 1961, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer received a hysterectomy by a white doctor without her consent while undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumour. This practice on black women was so prevalent down south it was called a “Mississippi Appendectomy”.
Belly of the Beast features footage of another famous case. The Relf sisters Minnie Lee and her mentally disabled sibling Mary Alice were sterilised in 1973 without knowledge or consent after their illiterate mother was duped into thinking they were receiving birth control shots.
California supposedly banned forced sterilisations in 1979 – “this blight on our state history,” as Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson puts it in the film. However, we learn that between 1997 and 2013 around 1,400 of these operations were carried out in the state, not only during labour but also on cis women and transgender people during other abdominal procedures.
It took the production team years to obtain that one staggering figure through a state audit and access to prison records, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) appearing to protect patient privacy when in reality they were covering up. Whistleblowers in prisons were also hesitant to come forward for fear of retaliation, says Cohn, which further hindered progress.
Belly of the Beast lays bare the ignorance, indifference and righteousness of those who were closet and most complicit. Several nurses say they were unaware these procedures were illegal. Melody Nickles, a nurse who worked at Central California Women’s Facility for 17 years, says, “CDC is punishment. Inmates become numbers. They don’t get names. And that’s what makes it easy to abuse them.”
Notice how Nickles dropped the “R” there, which stands for “Rehabilitation”. In the film, we see CDCR representatives at the hearing bristle at the mention of that word, as if it shouldn’t exist. No wonder an OB nurse at the end flippantly praises the efficiency in doing sterilisations on women who have just given birth – with just “a couple of extra snips” while you’re in there. What exactly are they trying to correct, or is “punish” what they really mean?
James Heinrich, the doctor who carried out many of these illegal procedures in California, is confronted by the Centre for Investigative Reporting’s Corey Johnson – now with the Tampa Bay Times – about the use of taxpayers’ money. His response? ”Well it’s cheaper than what you spend on welfare paying for these unwanted children.”
Johnson’s reporting on tubal ligations (mostly carried out on black and Latina women) helped to give this story greater journalistic weight, access funding and make it part of the national conversation, leading to a series of hearings at the California State Legislature. He sees Heinrich’s cost-benefit argument as part of a legacy you can trace all the way back to the fathers of the eugenics movement in California.
It’s easy to be swept up in the campaigning, crusading element of this film but it’s also important to acknowledge the enduring human cost and the long arduous road to justice. We can trace the trauma on Dillon’s face as she contemplates reliving her past. Longing to feel the joy of motherhood once again, she finds “purpose in her pain”.
We witness how the 10-year-plus case takes its toll on Cynthia who fears she has neglected her children for nothing. And there were setbacks: Dillon lost her case against the CDCR under the statute of limitations. But in 2014, California banned coerced sterilisations as a means of birth control and the “overly aggressive use of hysterectomies in prison,” as the bill’s sponsor State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson put it. The law now requires local jails and state prisons to track and report surgeries and also provides whistleblower protections.
Kelli Dillon (right) and Cynthia Chandler, two of the key protagonists in documentary Belly of the Beast, which exposes the shameful history of forced sterilisations inside California’s state prisons
A major step forward, right? Producer Angela Tucker thinks there’s still a long way to go. “Until reproductive justice is prioritised, and sterilisation is seen as a truly last-resort option, as opposed to “health care” for marginalised individuals, we’ll never really have control of our reproductive health.”
Rather than provide a neat happy ending, Belly of the Beast serves as a prologue, stoking ire and laying the groundwork for the continuing struggle. It’s also a triumph of investigative journalism, a celebration of collective action and finding solidarity in pursuing change.
The documentary has been seen by more than a million prisoners thanks to PBS. Perhaps it will offer hope to some of them and help to push for greater accountability. A new reparations bill for survivors of forced sterilisation in California was introduced in April. Dillon is also calling for anyone who has been forcefully sterilised to be notified as the state is still holding “these names hostage”.
The bigger fight is against more than a handful of malevolent clinicians or one state. It’s against systemic abuse and discrimination in all forms as Cohn explained to Marie Claire. “We're not just witnessing eugenics through the sterilisation abuse. We're witnessing systemic racism and population control through policing, through imprisonment itself, the immigration detention system [the Irwin Country Detention Centre scandal, for example], and through a lack of access to healthcare during the pandemic.”