Editing Compulsory sterilization (section)

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When the United States took census of Puerto Rico in 1899, the birth rate was 40 births per one thousand people.<ref name="Nick" /> By 1961, the birth rate had dropped to 30.8 per thousand.<ref name="Mass" /> In 1955, 16.5% of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized, this jumped to 34% in 1965.<ref name= "Mass" />

In 1969, sociologist [[Harriet Presser]] analyzed the 1965 Master Sample Survey of Health and Welfare in Puerto Rico.<ref name=Presser>{{Cite journal |last=Presser |first=Harriet B. |date=November 1969 |title=The Role of Sterilization in Controlling Puerto Rican Fertility |journal=Population Studies |volume=23 |issue=3 |pages=343–361 |doi=10.2307/2172875 |jstor=2172875 |pmid=22073953}}<!--|access-date=10 October 2014--></ref> She specifically analyzed data from the survey for women ages 20 to 49 who had at least one birth, resulting in an overall sample size of 1,071 women.<ref name="Presser" /> She found that over 34% of women aged 20–49 had been sterilized in Puerto Rico in 1965.<ref name="Presser" />

Presser's analysis also found that 46.7% of women who reported they were sterilized were between the ages of 34 and 39.<ref name="Presser" /> Of the sample of women sterilized, 46.6% had been married 15 to 19 years, 43.9% had been married for 10-to-14 years, and 42.7% had been married for 20-to-24 years.<ref name="Presser" /> Nearly 50% of women sterilized had three or four births.<ref name="Presser" /> Over 1/3 of women who reported being sterilized were sterilized in their twenties, with the average age of sterilization being 26.<ref name="Presser" />

A survey by a team of Americans in 1975 confirmed Presser's assessment that nearly 1/3 of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized.<ref name="Mass" /> As of 1977, Puerto Rico had the highest proportion of childbearing-aged persons sterilized in the world.<ref name="Mass" /> In 1993, [[ethnographic]] work done in New York by [[anthropologist]] Iris Lopez<ref name="Lopez" /> showed that the history of sterilization continued to effect the lives of Puerto Rican women even after they immigrated to the United States and lived there for generations.<ref name="Lopez" /> The history of the popularity of sterilization in Puerto Rico meant that Puerto Rican women living in America had high rates of female family members who had undergone sterilization, and it remained a highly popular form of birth control among Puerto Rican women living in New York.<ref name="Lopez" />