![]() ![]() In 1973, a new nursing graduate, Civil Townsend, meets the girls as part of her work with the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic. In Take My Hand, the preteen girls are named Erica and India. The Relf sisters were mentally disabled children, 12 and 14 years old, respectively, when they were surgically sterilized without their knowledge. This is the context, and backdrop, of Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s affecting new novel, Take My Hand, which hones in on the horrific forced annual sterilization of between 100,000 and 150,000 recipients of welfare benefits in the 1970s, inspired by the true story of Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf. The history of medical mistreatment of Black people and the poor by medical professionals is as long as the history of medicine in the Americas, and unfortunately, Alabama is the home base for many of these atrocities. ![]()
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