"Human Sterilization," Human Betterment Foundation (3)

1756. [left side] ---when so large a part of the voters are mentally abnormal? Is There Any Alternative? A community can follow one of three courses in dealing with the problem of parenthood among its mentally diseased and mentally deficient members who are not able to control their own fecundity. 1. It may do nothing at all. That is what most communities are now doing. The results are not satisfactory either to the community or to the parents. They are disastrous in their effect in future generations. 2. It may keep such patients under lock and key for the rest of their lives, or at least for the rest of their reproductive lives. Such a policy is too expensive to reach more than a minority, and it therefore impracticable. Even if possible, it would in many cases be an unnecessary hardship or cruelty to the patient. 3. It may use sterilization in selected cases, as an adjunct to a careful system of parole and supervision, which will aid patients to live in the community, to be self-supporting, and at the same time not put a new burden on society or pass on their handicaps to posterity. Eugenic sterilization is no panacea, but it is one of the many tested and dependable measures that will help reduce the burdens and increase the happiness and prosperity of the population in this and future generations. As such, it is one among many indispensable procedures in any modern program of social welfare. If recognized as an integral part of a broad system of protection and supervision of those unable to meet unaided the responsibilities of citizenship in a highly competitive industrial system, it can productive only of good. Moreover, modern knowledge of heredity has shown that the spread of constitutional defect can be prevented only by preventing the transmission of the defective genes which produce it. The Law in Twenty-seven States Twenty-seven states in the Union now have eugenic sterilization laws on their statute books. They are as follows, with the year in which the first law was adopted: Alabama . . .1919 Arizona . . .1929 California . . .1909 Connecitcut . . .1909 Delaware . . .1923 Idaho . . .1925 6 [right side] Indiana . . .1907 Iowa . . .1911 Kansas . . .1913 Montana . . .1923 Maine . . .1925 Michigan . . .1913 Minnesota . . .1925 Mississippi . . .1928 Nebraska . . .1915 New Hampshire . . . 1917 North Carolina . . . 1919 North Dakota . . . 1913 Oklahoma . . .1931 Oregon . . .1931 South Dakota . . .1917 Utah . . .1925 Vermont . . .1931 Virginia . . .1924 Washington . . .1909 West Virginia . . .1929 Wisconsin . . . 1913 Many of the states have made little use of these laws. This has been chiefly due to a lack of public education as to the need for such a measure; partly to the fact that some of the earlier laws were badly drawn and not easily workable. When actual experience, now abundantly available, was lacking, the legislatures of many states were obliged to proceed in theory, and sometimes enacted laws which were crude, indefinite, and unworkable. Several such acts were held unconstitutional by state courts. In a general way, and without unnecessary fault-finding, we have condemned such laws and all unreliable, unnecessary, or punitive practices contemplated under them. Investigation shows that the statutes of most states could be much improved in the light of recent experience and research and of the court decisions which, condemning certain proposals and practices, have upheld eugenic sterilization laws when they safeguard the rights of the individual as well as the public and posterity. In this connection we would call special attention to the case of Buck vs. Bell, appealed from Virginia to the United States Supreme Court. The plaintiff was a feeble-minded woman, daughter of a feebleminded mother, and herself the mother of a feebleminded, illegitimate child. In upholding the Virginia law, and the general principle it contained as constitutional, the court, in a strong decision written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, declared: Three generations of imbecile are enough." In time of war, it pointed out, the states calls on the fittest of its citizens to lay down their lives for the common good. In time of peace, shall it not be able to call on some of the most unfit of its citizens, not to sacrifice their lives, but to make a far lesser sacrifice, -- one which in most cases is regarded by them not as a sacrifice at all, but as a benefit to themselves, -- the renunciation of parenthood, when they are manifestly unfit for it? 7 [end]