GARDENA, Calif. — For Watts native Kelli Dillon, there is one thing an office must have: a fan.

“Me and the fan became friends at an early age,” said Dillon.


What You Need To Know

  • From 1909 to 1979, the state of California forcibly sterilized more than 20,000 women

  • Hundreds more women were unknowingly or forcibly sterilized up until the early 2000s while in mental health institutes and prisons

  • Most of the people sterilized were poor women of color

  • AB 1007 would give monetary compensation to living survivors of forced sterilizations

Dillon, who is now 45, went through menopause in her mid-20s after having been sterilized.

“I don’t want to see what happened to me happen to another young woman, and that’s important for me,” she said.

Dillon was just 19 when she was given a 15-year prison sentence. Once incarcerated, she went to see a doctor.

“When I accessed that healthcare, which was the gynecologist, I was asked if I wanted to have a particular surgery, which would see if I had any type of cancer cells,” she said.

Dillon agreed. She didn’t have cancer, and yet during that procedure, unknowingly, she was sterilized.

"When I discovered that I had been sterilized, I felt so broken," she said. "Someone felt that my life and the worthiness of my life, the ability to have children, was not mine to have."

Ever since she found out, Dillon has been working day in and day out, traveling to the Capitol and seeking justice for California’s approximate 244 living survivors of forced prison sterilizations and 383 living survivors of forced sterilization due to eugenics laws. As Dillon explained, justice might just be on the horizon.

For the third year in a row, Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo of the 51st assembly district has presented a bill, AB 1007, which is trying to correct what she says is a despicable wrong.

"We are working towards actually creating a compensation fund to identify and actually do the first ever reparations for women that were forcibility and unknowingly sterilized across the state of California," said Carrillo.

The goal, according to the assemblywoman, is to give each woman who was forcibly sterilized $25,000 in compensation and to alert and inform women who might still not know what happened to them.

"Both the Senate and the Assembly had it in their budget, and so now it moved forward, we presented that, and that’s what the legislature voted on, and that’s what’s being presented to the governor now," Carrillo said.

Dillon is currently the executive director of Back 2 The Basics, a nonprofit focused on advocacy.

“That’s the most rewarding, is that I helped another young lady maybe make better choices for her life,” she said.