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| “ | You don't understand, Mr. McCoy. You don't see how these girls...these children treat their babies. I never meant to hurt her, but I couldn't risk it. The world doesn't need another Traci Sands. | „ |
| ~ Rhodes justifying having forcibly sterilized and killed a Black teenager |
Gloria Rhodes is the overarching antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Birthright". Rhodes is an OB/GYN nurse who forcibly sterilizes women of color, eventually killing one.
She was portrayed by Stephanie Roth Haberle.
Biography[]
Rhodes formulated her twisted, racist and sexist beliefs while she worked for the Center of Population and Hygiene. The organization ran off white supremacist pseudoscience that argued people of color, in the United States and around the world, had too many children, were at risk of harming their children, and were incapable of understanding prenatal care, motherhood, and contraception. Rhodes was indoctrinated into the programs' philosophies from global volunteer work in the impoverished communities of numerous countries around the world, where the organization sterilized countless people under the arguments children wouldn't be endangered and mothers wouldn't die in childbirth. When Rhodes returned to the U.S. and started to work in the Operation Remedy OB/GYN office, she continuously the home and life situations of numerous black and Hispanic women and girls, and she decided even the most trivial behavioral concerns made them bad mothers and families, even simply from believing they had too many kids. Rhodes set out to sterilize numerous women and girls with illegal insertions of FDA-outlawed implants, which slowly sterilized the women overtime with benecrene, a hormone that destroyed the women's physiological processes of their reproductive systems. The implants would be removed once the operations were complete, and she and her assistant Savannah Watson forged records and signatures to lie about what operations were actually being conducted in their offices.
Rhodes once targeted Isabella Perez, who recovered from prostitution and drug addiction. Beforehand, Rhodes made her infertile under the lie she was conducting a pap smear, then removed the implant due to complications and lying Isabella had a yeast infection. After years of rehab, college, church, and getting engaged, Isabella asked Rhodes if she could have kids, which Rhodes replied to with the lie Isabella didn't fully get her life back together yet to buy time. She the targeted Traci Sands, who beat her daughter Keesha and used child support money for drugs, resulting in Keesha being removed by Child Services. Traci's granddaughter Lille, who was pained from never protecting Traci from Lille's own violent daughter Althea, went to Rhodes and personally signed for an IUD sterilization from Rhodes. When Rhodes found out Traci had sickle cell anemia, which wold put her in danger once under benecrene, Rhodes instead lied to Lillie there would be no complications. After Traci was arrested for killing the man who reported her to Child Services, she died in lockup while slowly succumbing to the effects of the drug, the police ignoring her protests to how sick she felt.
When Rhodes was taken to trial, attorney Paul Robinette, who once worked for the Manhattan District Attorney's office, defended her, even though he himself is a man of color; Robinette argued that Rhodes was still entitled to a defense. Watson testified against her, blackmailed by the prosecution with revoking her probation for drug charges if she didn't. Isabella was brutally shamed on the stand, but she honestly testified and defended herself and the life she built, being brought to tears when rightly blaming Rhodes for taking her dream of having children away from her. Lille was revealed to have been on a first-name basis with the clinic, so with the risk of conspiracy charges she faced, she was granted immunity to testify against Rhodes. In spite of Rhodes continuously defending her actions and blaming the victims, which was disregarded constantly, the jury found her guilty of second-degree manslaughter. Rhodes planned to appeal, but it would likely fail in part due to charges against her for numerous other illegal procedures. Rhodes was imprisoned and stripped of her medical credentials.
Trivia[]
- Rhodes and her crimes are inspired by multiple real-life criminal sterilization cases:
- James Quilligan, an American doctor prosecuted in California for the illegal sterilizations of multiple Latina women, usually in prison systems.
- Darlene Johnson, an American Black women who was sterilized under court order after abusing her children.
- Elaine Riddick Jessie, an American Black woman who, as a teenager, was impregnated from rape and ordered to be sterilized by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina. Her grandmother was manipulated into falsified "consent" due to her literacy struggles, leaving an "X" where she was supposed to place her signature.
- Nancy Hernandez, an American Latina woman who sued for being sterilized involuntarily while she was in prison.
- The benecrene implants are inspired by Jadelle implants, a contraceptive with dozens of lawsuits for complications and health dangers to numerous women administered the implant. The applications of them have also been argued to be racially targeted against black women and girls in the U.S., under racist arguments they can't learn safe sex and childcare.
- The white supremacist cultures surrounding sterilization in the episode are inspired by the medical politics of OB/GYN and fertility care for marginalized and impoverished in communities in Baltimore, Maryland, which activist Dorothy Roberts covers in her memoir Killing the Black Body.
- Rhodes is compared to the late Josef Mengele by multiple characters in the episode. Mengele was a physician and Nazi having worked under the SS, and one of the leading figures of Nazi human experimentation. Mengele fled war crime prosecution by hiding in South America, until he accidentally drowned.
External links[]
- Gloria Rhodes on the Law & Order Wiki
