A doctor who fought sterilization abuse

Ray Rakow, jazz aficionado, polemicist on sexual politics, psychiatrist, political activist and long-time friend and supporter of Workers World, may have been born in 1929 but he came of age politically during the tumultuous 1960s.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland who spoke only Yiddish until he was five, Rakow worked his way through medical school at the University of California/Berkeley and practiced internal medicine for several years before going to the Mayo Clinic to earn an advanced degree in psychiatry.

Shunning a lucrative private practice, Rakow chose to deliver health care to work ers and the oppressed in East Harlem. In 1962 he opened a walk-in psychi a tric clinic at Metropolitan Hospital to serve the predominantly Spanish-speaking community. There, he became aware of the discrimination, alienation and misery experienced daily by the Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican and other immigrant peoples in that neighborhood. He also noted the high incidence of sterilization among Puerto Rican women.

Avidly against the war in Vietnam and for national liberation movements, Ray and Cornelia, his equally activist partner of 37 years, began attending meetings of the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee in 1975. That’s where they met Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias, a Puerto Rican pediatrician.

Rodriguez-Trias had started the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA) in 1973 after the sterilization of two African American teen-agers made national headlines. Outraged at the government policy in the 1950s of promoting sterilization as a form of birth control for Puerto Rican women, Rodriguez was determined to expose and stop the racist, genocidal practice of sterilizing women of color and poor white women.

The Rakows became active in CESA, which at the time was gathering data on sterilization abuse cases. When CESA learned that Dr. Antonio Silva, the primary architect of the government’s sterilization program and then director of the obstetrics and gynecology department at a major San Juan hospital, was about to be appointed to a similar position at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, Rakow chose to leverage his job to further his politics.

Going undercover as a visiting medical practitioner, Rakow got Silva to talk at length about how he had implemented the sterilization program. Then Rakow gave an in-depth interview to the daily San Juan Star and to Claridad, a pro-independence weekly, detailing how 35 percent of Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age had been coerced into becoming sterilized. Silva never got the job at Lincoln, and Rakow eventually lost his.

But Rakow was justifiably proud of his exposé. Indeed, he signed on as a plaintiff in the lawsuit that led in 1977 to the adoption of guidelines designed to stop sterilization abuse in New York City. That victory led to similar regulations instituted by the federal government in 1979.

After CESA disbanded, the Rakows became active in New York’s Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterili za tion Abuse (CARASA), which helped formulate the many-faceted political position that women’s liberation could only be achieved when the many social, economic, political and cultural components of reproductive rights were met for all women.

“Ray had strong opinions about everything,” says Cornelia. Among the topics that fired him up were gender issues and Zionism. “Ray thought that people being locked into gender roles put a real brake on them politically. He never missed a Gay Pride march.”

While Rakow identified himself as culturally Jewish, he was adamantly opposed to Zionism and all forms of racism. He once sent a strongly worded letter to pro test the pro-Israel position of the Amer ican Academy of Psychoanalysis. Rakow was particularly drawn to Workers World’s analysis of and support for the global class struggle.

Known for his dry wit and a matching twinkle in his eye, Rakow fought lung cancer and other ailments in the same relentless way he fought imperialism. After he died on April 10, Cornelia elected to donate Ray’s body for medical study at Einstein Hospital in the Bronx. She says, “It’s fitting that Ray, who was born in the Bronx, is returning to the Bronx.”

Davis met the Rakows while representing Workers World Party in CESA and CARASA.