Dolores Madrigal, lead plaintiff in landmark sterilization case, dies at 90

On a fall morning in East L.A. in 1974, Dolores Madrigal and her husband, Orencio, ate breakfast while listening to ranchera radio station KWKW when a news segment aired that would change her life.

The couple heard about how 100 people had protested in front of Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center to decry the hospital’s years-long practice of sterilizing low-income women without their consent. The rally came in the wake of a lawsuit filed against the Boyle Heights hospital by three Mexican American women who alleged they were victims.

After hearing the story, the 40-year-old Madrigal wondered out loud to her husband: Was she one of those women?

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The previous year, they had welcomed the birth of their second son, Sergio, at the hospital. Before going into labor, however, Madrigal shooed off a wave of nurses who asked if she wanted to have her fallopian tubes tied. She finally signed a form in the haze of her pre-labor pains, then quickly forgot about it.

A visit to the hospital the day after the KWKW report confirmed that the document authorized doctors to sterilize Madrigal.

She and her husband had dreams of a large family. Instead, Orencio turned to alcohol. Dolores sunk into such a depression that others had to take care of her young sons for months.

But when lawyers representing Mexican American survivors of forced sterilization tracked her down in 1975 and asked if she wanted to join a class-action lawsuit against County-USC alleging doctors had violated their clients’ civil rights to bear children, Madrigal quickly said yes. She became the lead plaintiff.

“Dolores emerged as kind of the cheerleader for the group,” said Antonia Hernández, former head of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the California Community Foundation. She was one of the lawyers who represented the 10 women who joined the case, formally titled Madrigal vs. Quilligan. “She’d say, ‘They did this to us, y no está bien [and it’s not right].”

The lawsuit was unsuccessful but proved a landmark. The California Department of Health soon after began to offer sterilization information in English and Spanish. Hernández became a civil rights icon who focused on fighting for Latinos through most of her career. Gloria Molina, the chair of a Chicana group that had agreed to bear any legal costs for the plaintiffs and appeared alongside Madrigal at a press conference announcing the lawsuit, went on to forge a pioneering career as a Eastside politician.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors formally apologized in 2018 to all women forcibly sterilized at County-USC. A monument in their name was dedicated there four years later. Madrigal vs. Quilligan continues to be taught in universities and retold in academic books as a cautionary tale of eugenics and public health gone wrong, its plaintiffs hailed as reproductive-rights heroines.

Dolores Madrigal, right, with Gloria Molina at a news conference in 1975 announcing a class-action suit against Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center alleging they sterilized 10 Latino patients without their consent.

(Ben Olender/Los Angeles Times)

“Dolores’ courage was tremendous,” said Virginia Espino, who wrote about the case in her 2007 doctoral dissertation. “She literally defended our right to exist.”

But when Espino decided soon afterward to co-produce a documentary, “No Más Bebés,” about the case, its namesake was nowhere to be found.

Espino asked parishioners at Sacred Heart Church in Lincoln Heights, where Madrigal had faithfully attended Mass for decades, about her whereabouts and put the word out in other Catholic parishes across Los Angeles. A private detective finally found Madrigal living in Las Vegas with her oldest son, Oren, who didn’t learn about his mother’s tragic, historic past until answering the researcher’s call.

“I asked my mom, ‘How come you never told me?’ and she really didn’t have an answer,” Oren told The Times in a recent interview. “But maybe it was better that she didn’t because a younger me would’ve been way too angry. I’m still angry. But after she told me, I wanted to take care of my mom and her trauma more than ever.”

Dolores Madrigal passed away Nov. 9 in Las Vegas of natural causes. She was 90.

She was born in the small town of Villa Purificación, Mexico, and migrated to the United States in 1965. Madrigal legalized her status with the help of a white family for whom Dolores took care of their developmentally disabled son, according to Oren.

In East L.A., she reunited with her childhood sweetheart, Orencio. They married in 1971, and had their sons one year after the other.

“He was so happy,” Madrigal said of her husband in “No Más Bebes,” as home footage showed her cooking in their kitchen and Orencio playing with their sons. After the couple found out about her surreptitious sterilization, “All our plans came tumbling down.”

Hernández first met Madrigal in 1975, cold-knocking on her door after finding out about Madrigal’s plight from documents given to her by a County-USC whistleblower.

“She had this lust for life — happy, vivacious and a don’t-take-crap-from-nobody attitude,” Hernández recalled. “The one you couldn’t break down when you had to testify.”

That’s what County-USC lawyers tried to do during the trial, which was heard before a federal judge because the legal team for the 10 women didn’t think they’d get a fair trial from a jury. At one point, defense lawyers produced the document Madrigal had signed just before giving birth to Sergio, which featured her signature next to the phrase “No más hijos por vida” — no more children for life. Madrigal responded she didn’t recall signing the paper but reiterated “she was in bad pain and very frightened” at the time, according to Hernández’s notes of the deposition.

The retired attorney said she stayed in touch only intermittently with Madrigal after the case because “the pain was too much for everyone involved.”

Madrigal went on to work as a teacher’s aide at Lincoln High in Lincoln Heights before leaving in the mid-1980s to care for her ailing husband and their two sons, who had joined gangs.

“Me and my brother are still alive because of my mom’s prayers,” Oren said. “When I was in jail, she used to be one of the first people to stand in line — she would do it for six, seven hours just to see us for 15 minutes. She didn’t have much money, but she would send it all to us.”

After living in the Los Angeles area for decades, Madrigal relocated to Las Vegas in the 2000s to be near a sister while her sons served their sentences. When Oren finally got out, the two moved in together. He remembered a mother “with a great sense of humor and a sarcastic wit” who liked to dote on her Chihuaha-dachshund mix, Hercules, and attend daily Mass.

“Every day when she’d go on the bus for her adventures, she would make friends,” Oren said. But he long noted a melancholy that “all of a sudden made sense” when the private researcher hired by Espino to track her down for “No Más Bebés” contacted him. Oren convinced his mother to appear but she agreed to just one day of interviews, according to Espino, and declined to participate in any publicity or screenings for the documentary, which debuted in 2015 and was nominated for an Emmy.

“She put herself out there in the ‘70s in a very public way,” Espino said. “It took a lot out of her. [Madrigal] didn’t want to do it again...She had this shyness of her, but a fierce courageousness. She felt she was wronged, and she wanted people to know that. And she wanted the public to know this violation happened not just to her, but to so many others.”

Oren saw only part of “No Más Bebés” at his home before turning it off “because it was too tough” to bear. His mother never saw it.

“Sadly, a lot of immigrants — a lot of women — they just take abuse and don’t do anything about it,” he said. “She didn’t take what happened to her. She did something about it.”

Madrigal is survived by her sons, Oren and Sergio; four grandchildren, Jose Angel, Jimmy, Esteban and Andrea; and a sister, Antonia Nuñez. Andrea is expecting her first child next year.