In Take My Hand, the protagonist Civil Townsend works at a family planning center in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973. She visits a Black family and administers birth control shots to two sisters, ages 11 and 13, at the behest of her supervisor, a man who later orders the girls to be sterilized. This story is based on the real-life sterilization of Mary Alice and Minnie Relf, whose mother signed a document agreeing to the procedure — with an X, because she was illiterate. The family later claimed they had been misled and sued; the class-action lawsuit launched by the Southern Poverty Law Center found many other instances of forced or coerced sterilization. Many of the victims were poor and agreed to the procedure when a doctor told them their welfare benefits could be taken away otherwise. And many were Black or members of other marginalized racial groups. Involuntary sterilization has been used as a tool for eugenics in the United States for over a century, intended to reduce the ...