Sterilization

Historical Perspective of Sterilization

Sterilization in the early decades of the 20th century was widely believed to be the surest route to national prosperity through the elimination of the “unfit” and the prevention of “race suicide” for healthy whites. More than a single procedure, sterilization can be tubal ligation or hysterectomy for women and castration for men to prevent pregnancy and childbearing of “degenerates,” the genetically inferior, criminals, and all others, especially the poor or immigrants, who posed a threat to ideals of the family and entrenched race and class boundaries. Equated with patriotism as a citizen's duty, sterilization was seen as a cure for poverty, overpopulation, and promiscuity. Thousands of parents sent their teens and young adults to state homes for sterilization in the 1920s and 1930s, but a sexual double standard was practiced. Wendy Kline, in Building a Better Race, proposed that there were differential benefits for men and women to be sterilized. Traveling museum exhibits on physical fitness, the growth of eugenics societies, and the publication of eugenicist journals and college textbooks all indexed broad public support of sterilization at that time.

Sterilization Campaigns

Mass sterilization campaigns were carried out at the state and federal levels often without informed consent and with the use of coercion. Beginning with Indiana in 1907, many states introduced or expanded bills permitting forced sterilization as cost-effective alternatives to social welfare programs in the face of economic recession. Writing the majority opinion for the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell in 1927, which upheld the constitutionality of Virginia's 1924 forcible sterilization law, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” The record number of sterilizations in California, recorded in Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of the Results of 6,000 Operations in California 1909-1929 by eugenicists Paul Popenoe and E. S. Gosney, was later hailed by Nazi Germany.

By the 1950s and 1960s, poor women and women of color were the targets of mass sterilization campaigns. Fannie Lou Hamer, a poor sharecropper from Mississippi, made her forced sterilization— often referred to as “Mississippi appendectomies” because they were considered routine and commonplace—part of her political platform for civil rights. Biographer Chana Kai Lee in For Freedom's Sake, articulates the necessity of understanding the symbolic power and meaning of reproduction, especially in relation to race, class, and gender. As late as 1964, Mississippi proposed a sterilization bill that would have criminalized women on welfare for having additional children while receiving aid. Those convicted could submit to sterilization in exchange for jail time. Throughout the South, sterilization abuse was significant. The Southern Poverty Law Center exposed the enormity of this abuse [Page 808]when it filed a class action lawsuit in federal court seeking a ban on the use of federal funds for sterilization after 14-year old Minnie Lee Reif and her 12-year-old sister Mary Alice Reif were sterilized without their parents' consent in Montgomery.

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