In 1952, Charlie Follett, a wayward orphan, was a resident of the Sonoma County State Boys Home. One day when he was 14-years old, he was\u00a0taken to the hospital, told to disrobe and sit on a table. The orderly didn\u2019t explain what was about to happen to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst, they shot me with some kind of medicine. It was supposed to deaden the nerves,\u201d Charlie Follett told the Sacramento Bee, describing his forced vasectomy. \u201cThen\u00a0the next thing I heard was snip, snip. Then when they did the other side, it seemed like they were pulling my whole insides out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Follett was a minor, unaware of what was happening to him or why, unable to resist or even challenge it. The state had simply decided that this teenager (and thousands of\u00a0others like him) was a derelict, unworthy of the right to reproduce.<\/p>\n
Follett was one of at least 20,000 people sterilized against their will by the state of California from 1909 to 1963, in a eugenics program explicitly\u00a0geared toward ridding the state of \u201cenfeebled\u201d and \u201cdefective\u201d people.<\/p>\n
California\u2019s eugenics program proved so efficient that in the 1930s, Nazi scientists asked California eugenicists for advice on how to run their own\u00a0sterilization regime. \u201cGermany used California\u2019s program as its chief example that this was a working, successful policy,\u201d says Christina Cogdell, author of\u00a0Eugenic Design<\/a>.\u00a0\u201dThey modeled their law on California\u2019s law.\u201d<\/p>\n But California wasn\u2019t alone. The state of Virginia forcibly sterilized 8,300 people. North Carolina sterilized 7,600 people against their will, the last in\u00a01974.\u00a0My home state of Indiana has a wretched record, with 2,500 forced sterilizations, nearly equally divided between young women and men, with most occurring between\u00a01938 and 1953. Oregon, which had a population about half the size of Indiana, performed 2300 sterilizations, with 60 percent of them conducted on patients entombed in the\u00a0barbarous state mental hospital. The sterilizations were approved by the state-sanctioned Oregon Eugenics Board. Incredibly, this board wasn\u2019t disbanded until 1975, though\u00a0the state\u2019s eugenics program persisted until 1983.<\/p>\n A grim chapter of history, you say. But the era of sterilization hasn\u2019t ended yet. It has simply migrated from state hospitals and health departments to\u00a0the courts and medical offices. Take the case of\u00a0Kathy Looney, a Louisiana woman convicted in 2000 of abusing three of her eight children. She was given\u00a0a savage choice: either undergo medical sterilization or face lengthy jail time. Ultimately, she agreed to the sterilization and the judge issued a 10-year suspended sentence and placed Ms. Looney on five years of\u00a0probation.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to have to lock you up to keep you from having any more children,\u201d barked District Judge Carl V. Sharp. \u201cSo some kind of medical procedure is\u00a0needed to make sure you don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n In this context, the\u00a0Annals of Internal Medicine<\/i>\u00a0published a revealing comparison by Drs. Andre N. Sofair and Lauris C. Kaldjian of German and U.S.\u00a0sterilization policies from 1930 to 1945. During the years when Americans were being involuntarily sterilized as part of a multi-state eugenics program dating\u00a0back to 1907, what did the leading medical journals here have to say on the topic in their editorials?<\/p>\n The authors reviewed the relevant periodicals only from the 1930s. Even in this narrow time frame, against the backdrop of Nazi eugenic programs, the facts\u00a0are instructive. The\u00a0American Journal of Medicine, the\u00a0Annals of Internal Medicine<\/i>\u00a0and the\u00a0American Journal of Psychiatry\u00a0<\/i>had nothing to say. The\u00a0American\u00a0Journal of Public Health<\/i>\u00a0ran one anonymous editorial on mental health that Sofair and Kaldjian described as \u201crelevant,\u201d probably because it suggested that\u00a0rising rates of hospitalization for the mentally infirm didn\u2019t necessarily mean that Americans\u2019 mental IQs were falling, a belief that was exploited by the\u00a0advocates of eugenic sterilization.<\/p>\n A special committee convened by the American Neurological Association endorsed the widely held view that mentally \u201cdefective\u201d people were a drain on\u00a0national resources. The committee took a positive view of \u201cfeeblemindedness,\u201d on the grounds that it breeds \u201cservile, useful people who do the dirty work of\u00a0the race.\u201d The committee reviewed the Germany sterilization law of 1933, and praised it for precision and scientific grounding.<\/p>\n The editorial record of the\u00a0New England Journal<\/i>\u00a0in the early 1930s was dreadful. Editorials lamented the supposed increase in the rate of American\u00a0feeblemindedness as dangerous, and the economic burden of supporting the mentally feeble as \u201cappalling.\u201d In 1934, The\u00a0Journal\u2019s<\/i> editor, Morris Fishbein,\u00a0wrote that \u201cGermany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit,\u201d and argued that the \u201cindividual must give way to the\u00a0greater good.\u201d<\/p>\n While researching our book\u00a0Whiteout<\/a>,\u00a0I came across a remarkable federal court opinion on sterilizations of the poor. In 1974, U.S. District Court Judge\u00a0Gerhard Gesell wrote that \u201cover the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually in federally-funded\u00a0programs.\u201d<\/p>\n Gesell pointed out that though Congress had decreed that family planning programs function on a voluntary basis, \u201can indefinite number of poor people have\u00a0been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally funded benefits would be withdrawn. \u2026 Patients\u00a0receiving Medicaid assistance at childbirth are evidently the most frequent targets of this pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n Starting in the early 1990s, poor women were allowed Medicaid funding to have Norplant inserted into their arms; then, when they complained of pain and\u00a0other unwelcome side effects, they were told no funding was available to have the Norplant rods taken out. Here, therefore, was a new species of involuntary\u00a0sterilization, implemented under the approving gaze of Bill and Hillary Clinton,\u00a0who later imposed their cruel Malthusian obsession on the destitute women of Haiti.<\/p>\n In the coming age of austerity, as poverty, homelessness and hunger take deep root across the Republic, the eugenic impulse is almost certain to reemerge,\u00a0probably dressed in the old progressive guise of social improvement and economic benevolence.<\/p>\n ______________________<\/p>\n Jeffrey St. Clair\u00a0<\/b><\/i>is the author of\u00a0Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature<\/a>,\u00a0Grand Theft Pentagon<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Born Under a Bad Sky<\/a>. His latest book is\u00a0Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion<\/a>. He can be reached at:\u00a0sitka@comcast.net<\/a>.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n