EDGEWOOD, N.M. (AP) — In the 1970s, the U.S. agency that provides health care to Native Americans sterilized thousands of women without their full and informed consent, depriving them of the opportunity to start or grow families.

Decades later, the state of New Mexico is set to investigate that troubling history and its lasting harm.

New Mexico legislators approved a measure this week to have the state Indian Affairs Department and the Commission on the Status of Women examine the history, scope and continuing impact of forced and coerced sterilizations of women of color by the Indian Health Service and other providers. The findings are expected to be reported to the governor by the end of 2027.

“It’s important for New Mexico to understand the atrocities that took place within the borders of our state,” said state Sen. Linda Lopez, one of the legislation’s sponsors.

It’s not the first state to confront its past. In 2023, Vermont launched a truth and reconciliation commission to study forced sterilization of marginalized groups including Native Americans. In 2024, California began paying reparations to people who had been sterilized without their consent in state-run prisons and hospitals.

The New Mexico Legislature also laid the groundwork to create a separate healing commission and for a formal acknowledgment of a little known piece of history that haunts Native families

Sarah Deer, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, said it’s long overdue.

“The women in these communities carry these stories,” she said.

Outside of a 1976 U.S. Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has never acknowledged what Deer calls a campaign of “systemic” sterilizations in Native American communities.

The Indian Health Service and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment on New Mexico’s investigation.

A troubling history

In 1972, Jean Whitehorse was admitted to an Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, New Mexico, with a ruptured appendix. Just 22 and a new mother, Whitehorse said she remembers experiencing “extreme pain” as providers presented her with a flurry of consent forms before rushing her into emergency surgery.

“The nurse held the pen in my hand. I just signed on the line,” said Whitehorse, a Navajo Nation citizen.

A few years later when she was struggling to conceive a second child, Whitehorse said she returned to the hospital and learned she had received a tubal ligation. The news devastated Whitehorse, contributed to the breakdown of her relationship and sent her spiraling into alcoholism, she said.

Advocates already were sounding the alarm about women like Whitehorse who were entering IHS clinics and hospitals to give birth or for other procedures and later finding themselves unable to conceive. The activist group Women of All Red Nations, or WARN — an offshoot of the American Indian Movement — was formed in part to expose the practice.

In 1974, Choctaw and Cherokee physician Connie Redbird Uri reviewed IHS records and alleged that the federal agency had sterilized as many as 25% of its female patients of childbearing age. Some of the women Uri interviewed were unaware they had been sterilized. Others said they were bullied into consenting or misled to believe the procedure was reversible.

Uri’s allegations helped prompt the GAO audit, which found that the Indian Health Service sterilized 3,406 women in four of the agency’s 12 service areas between 1973 and 1976, including in Albuquerque. The agency found that some patients were under the age of 21 and most had signed forms that didn’t comply with federal regulations meant to ensure informed consent.

GAO researchers determined that interviewing women who had undergone sterilizations “would not be productive,” citing a single study of cardiac surgical patients in New York who struggled to recall past conversations with doctors. Because of the lack of patient interviews and the narrow purview of the GAO’s audit, advocates say the full scope and impact remains unaccounted for.

A venue to tell their stories

Whitehorse didn’t share her experience for nearly 40 years, she said. First, she told her daughter. Then, other family.

“Each time I tell my story, it relieves the shame, the guilt,” Whitehorse said. “Now I think, why should I be ashamed? It’s the government that should be ashamed of what they did to us.”

Whitehorse now advocates publicly for victims of forced sterilization. In 2025, she testified about the practice to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and called for the United States to formally apologize.

Whitehorse hopes New Mexico’s investigation will offer more victims a venue to tell their stories. But advocates like Rachael Lorenzo, executive director of the Albuquerque-based sexual and reproductive health organization Indigenous Women Rising, say the commission must be careful to avoid re-traumatizing survivors across generations.

“It’s such a taboo topic. There’s a lot of support that needs to happen when we tell these traumatic stories,” said Lorenzo.

In a New Mexico legislative hearing earlier this month, retired Indian Health Service physician Dr. Donald Clark testified that he has seen patients in their 20s and 30s “seeking contraception but not trusting that they will not be irreversibly sterilized” because of stories quietly passed down by their grandmothers, mothers and aunts.

“It’s still an issue that is affecting women’s choice of birth control today,” Clark said.

A pattern of disenfranchisement

A 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell upheld states’ rights to sterilize people it considered “unfit” to reproduce, paving the way for the forced sterilization of immigrants, people of color, disabled people and other disenfranchised groups throughout the 20th century.

According to Lorenzo and Deer, the sterilization of Native American women fits into a pattern of federal policies meant to disrupt Native people’s reproductive autonomy, from the systemic removal of Indigenous children into government boarding schools and non-Native foster homes to the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prevents tribal clinics and hospitals that receive federal funding from performing abortions in almost all cases.

In Canada, doctors have been sanctioned as recently as 2023 for sterilizing Indigenous women without their consent.

Deer said New Mexico’s investigation could pave the way for accountability. But without cooperation from the federal government, Deer said the commission’s fact-finding abilities would be limited.

Earthquakes spike by as much as 700 percent in Permian

Levi Hill/News-Sun

The ground is starting to shake in the Permian Basin and those who live in the region are beginning to take notice even as scientist watch the number of earthquakes in the region skyrocket.

The sheer number of earthquakes has increased but luckily the magnitude of most remains small.

According to Dr. Urbi Basu, a research scientist with the New Mexico Tech Seismological Observatory, earthquake frequency has been rising in New Mexico since 2018.

“Previously there was not much activity,” Basu said. “Southeast New Mexico had very few and suddenly we are seeing a lot. They are not high magnitude but they are very frequent.”

How frequent? As many as 400 per year in some areas.

In an area of the Delaware Basin near Carlsbad where the U.S. Geological Survey is closely monitoring, the number of quakes has skyrocketed from just 50 per year prior to 2018 to now as many as 400.

“There were 50 earthquakes greater than 1.8 magnitude on average prior to 2018,” Basu said. “Now the average is 300-400 some years. Seventy to 80 percent are less than a magnitude three.”

According to an AI search, New Mexico has seen approximately 2,906 earthquakes with a magnitude 1.5 or greater in the 365 days leading up to Feb. 12.

The same search revealed most of those quakes come from the Carlsbad region with some 2,400 per year average, including very small micro-quakes.

An interactive map on the USGS website found that in the 30 days leading up to Feb. 11, there were 736 earthquakes of all magnitudes recorded across the Permian Basin region of Texas and New Mexico.

Human induced seismicity

The sudden increase in earthquakes stems from what the USGS calls “induced seismicity” that stems not from tectonic plate activity, but rather industrial operations.

In the Permian the culprit seismologists point to is oilfield drilling and the reinjection of produced water back underground.

“It is human induced,” Basu said. “The Permian produces a significant amount of daily (water) production, injection for hydraulic fracturing, and for every barrel of oil there is a barrel of produced water. It is reinjected back into the subsurface. The volume is (average) 4 million barrels per day in New Mexico. The rate it is being injected and the depth causing stress changes in the subsurface.”

She said the majority of the earthquakes recorded in the Permian originate from shallow faults in the same depths in which most produced water injection wells are drilled.

She said the same increase in New Mexico began occurring in Oklahoma in 2008 and 2010.

In 2021, Texas has begun implementing daily injection volume limits on oil producers in an attempt to curb the increased seismicity in that state. However, according to TexNet Earthquake Catalog, the number of earthquake events in Texas has remained on the rise.

In 2021, there were 177 recorded seismic events recorded in Texas. By 2023 that number had climbed to 2,359 and last year there were 9,238 recorded seismic events in Texas, the vast majority coming from the Delaware Basin of the Permian.

“Scientists know and the (N.M.) Oil Conservation Division are aware of these earthquakes happening,” Basu said. “One way we try to monitor the region at the Bureau of Geology is we build seismic stations that register those earthquakes.”

She said New Mexico’s portion of the Permian has 11 seismic stations, but the bureau recently received funds to install 11 more by the end of 2026.

Area of concern?

At what point does the increase in seismic activity become a concern?

Basu said the answer is multi-pronged.

“In Oklahoma or Texas where these similar things have been happening, the threat mainly is hazards related to humans or buildings nearby,” she said. “These regions where it is happening in New Mexico there is not much population. In terms of those kinds of hazards affecting people, there is not that much.”

Basu said the concern grows when number of earthquakes of a higher magnitude begins to grow. Most quakes in the Permian are smaller, of one magnitude or less, but there have been larger earthquakes.

The largest earthquake ever recorded in New Mexico was an estimated magnitude 6.2 event that struck near Socorro on Nov. 15, 1906.

Larger quakes have struck in the Permian Basin region in recent years including a magnitude 5.3 near Whites City, N.M., in May 2025 that was felt as far away as El Paso, and a magnitude 5.0 quake near the Texas-New Mexico border felt as far away as Roswell in February 2025.

Basu said when quakes above a magnitude 2.0 begin increasing in frequency by a factor of 10, it becomes “a slight concern to us.”

“Until now we haven’t seen that,” she said. “Magnitude two earthquakes are not very high threat. Generally, people start feeling them around magnitude 6. A two is not what someone will feel if driving or walking.”

The News-Sun reached out to the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department’s Oil Conservation Division to discuss the increased seismicity.

Public Information Officer Sidney Hill offered the state’s seismicity response protocol, which was updated in December 2021.

That protocol becomes active when there are two 2.5 magnitude earthquakes within a 10-mile radius within a 30-day period.

In the event of such an occurrence the OCD begins requiring operators to report daily injection volumes and average surface pressures and install seismic monitoring equipment around any wells within the 10-mile zone.

“OCD has also proactively initiated new Underground Injection Control permitting processes with enhanced requirements to address induced seismicity, including more detailed technical reviews and modeling,” Hill said.

The OCD protocol has increased requirements for similar seismic events of 3.0 and 3.5 or greater events that include cutting produced water injection by as much as 50 percent, or stopping all injection completely in the event of quakes greater than 3.5 magnitude that meet the protocol requirements of 2 within 30 days within a 10-mile radius.

Water reuse

Hill said produced water is reused significantly in the oilfield with about 57 percent of the 10.7 billion gallons generated in 2025 reused for well completions.

However, that leaves 4.6 billion gallons of produced water generated in New Mexico annually being reinjected.

One solution is reuse of produced water, what many in the business call “fit for purpose,” cleaning the water to various levels to be used either in industrial, agricultural or even surface water recharge.

Texas is on the cusp of pumping cleaned, produced water into the Pecos River to return it to historic water flow levels and an entire industry of companies is springing up in Texas around extracting chemicals and metals from produced water including lithium.

Last year, Element3, a lithium-extraction company backed by major oilfield producers in the Permian Basin, announced its first commercial-scale lithium extraction and processing facility to be built in the Midland Basin in the first quarter of 2026.

At a meeting in Hobbs last month, with the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, Mike Hightower, with the New Mexico Desal Association, said all economic development in the state will depend on water in the coming years.

“This part of the country is the only part of the country without a surface water supply,” he said. “Economic development tracks directly with water and energy supplies. To do what we need to do, what we want to do, we are going to have to treat produced brackish water.”

Texas is investing billions in desal technology while New Mexico has shut down almost all pilot projects in desal tech for produced water in the oilfield.

Decreasing seismic activity in the oilfield hinges on finding a new way to use produced water, but New Mexico has been reluctant to move in that direction.

Political not science

For New Mexico, the problem isn’t science. It’s politics.

On Feb. 7, the House Acequias, Agriculture and Water Resources Committee killed House Bill 207 in a 5-4 vote after four and a half hours of testimony and debate.

The bill was designed to force the state’s Water Quality Control Commission to adopt rules and issue permits by the end of 2026 that would expand produced water reuse.

The WQCC was previously tasked with creating those rules, but has dragged its feet following a lawsuit from environmental groups that Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham, a proponent of water solutions for the state, pressured the WQCC to adopt rule petitions from the oil and gas industry through pressure from cabinet secretaries.

Many who spoke against the bill said there is no science to support produced water can be cleaned and reused.

“Protection of human health and the environment must be based on sound science, not profit-driven industry spin,” Western Environmental Law Center attorney Tannis Fox, said in a statement at the meeting. “The best science tells us the technology to effectively treat oil and gas wastewater at scale does not exist.”

However, according to New Mexico State University’s Produced Water Research Consortium, which has been investigating produced water reuse for half a decade, it can be cleaned and used safely.

“Can we clean that water? The answer is yes,” said Dr. Pei Xu, who heads up research at the consortium. “We take it very seriously. Many people have concerns about the safety of the water. We went through an integrated, wholistic approach. It can be treated to a safe level.”

Produced water comes in stages: Raw, treated, desalinated and purified. Purified produced water has had the contaminants pulled away and the consortium has been raising fish in that water as well as feeding it to mice.

In terms of the importance of produced water reuse for the state, it goes beyond just having water for thirsty industries like hydrogen power plants and AI data centers. It means reducing earthquake frequencies.

“If the (injected water) volumes are brought down the earthquakes diminish,” Basu said.