Interviewee: James Watson. James Watson talks about the spread of forced sterilization laws in the United States.

Here's the legislative status of the eugenic or sterilization in the United States up to 1935. One can see that the majority of states like California or Michigan or Minnesota, Virginia, North and South Carolina, they permitted it. A number of other states, laws had never really moved forward, like Ohio, or Kentucky, or Tennessee or Arkansas, Colorado, Nevada. In many cases you could say these were relatively unpopulated states. Texas was considering it and Illinois and Pennsylvania and New Jersey. New Jersey had no sterilization so it was really an institution in New Jersey which first claimed that mental defectiveness ran straight through families.

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