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64 Over the last 125 years, physicians in at least thirty-seven states sterilized some of the citizens that they considered unfit, and most of these physicians had the imprimatur of their states’ legislatures. After decades of efforts, advocates of coerced sterilization finally persuaded thirty-two state legislatures to enact laws that would allow physicians to sterilize mental health patients, the chronically ill, and certain criminals. The call for compulsory sterilization laws was part of the progressive movement that swept the nation shortly after the turn of the century, and it included efforts to limit the marriages of certain citizens, which, it was believed, would likewise control who had children. Judging from the rhetoric employed by legislators, they were most strongly motivated to pass these laws by anxieties about the sexual activities of some of their constituents and by a desire to save money by reducing the number of people the state would have to house in its prisons and the growing number of mental health facilities. From Marriage Restriction to Compulsory Sterilization Excluding Gideon Lincecum’s 1855 and 1856 efforts, legislation to prevent the procreation of unfit citizens originated with state regulation of the marriage of people with venereal diseases and those judged to be feebleminded. Advocates of these laws worked under the assumption that by preventing undesirable people from marrying, they were likewise preventing them from producing children. Among the first of these was the 1895 Connecticut law that prohibited “marriage or intercourse where either man or woman is epileptic,imbecile,or feebleminded, and the woman is under the age of forty-five.”1 In his 1895 address as president of the American Bar Association, James C. Carter described the Connecticut law as “a novel one, designed apparently to prevent unhealthy progeny,” and punishable by at least three years’ imprisonment.2 Carter supported the legislation, calling it a “practical deterrent” and celebrating its ability to protect “future generations The Legislative Solution c h a p t e r 3  Chap-03.qxd 6/20/07 3:29 PM Page 64 the legislative solution 65 from the evil operation of the laws of heredity” that heretofore required “the perpetual imprisonment of habitual criminals.” The Connecticut law sought only to limit marriage and illicit sexual intercourse; it did not call for the sterilization of its targets. But by 1910, advocates of sterilization laws recognized that marriage and commitment laws were valuable precursors to compulsory sterilization legislation . They also recognized that“there is procreation among certain classes without marriage,” so more strident interventions than marriage laws were ultimately necessary if they were to “provide for a better posterity.”3 In the nineteenth century, state interest in the institution of marriage was motivated by gendered notions of morality that were tinged with obvious signs of racism. Legislators enacted laws that would prevent interracial marriages— miscegenation laws—intended to protect the honor of white women and prevent the mingling of the races. John Jackson Jr., a historian who has studied the relationship between American science, the law, and race, concluded that the nineteenth -century justifications for miscegenation laws developed eugenic rationales in the twentieth century. Pointing to the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act, the strictest such law in the nation, he explained that “it was the first miscegenation law in the nation passed on a eugenics basis.”4 In similar fashion, the emergence of marriage laws intended to stop the spread of physical and social ailments evolved from nineteenth-century concerns about the spread of sexually transmitted disease from husband to wife to child, to twentieth-century eugenic concerns about hereditary basis of defects. Between 1907 and 1937, two-thirds of the states passed compulsory sterilization laws, and the majority of them had prior laws that regulated the marriage of citizens declared feebleminded or diseased. Of the thirty-two states that passed a law compelling the sterilization of prisoners and inmates of state institutions, 87.5 percent of them had a preexisting law that prevented some citizens, depending on their mental or physical status, from marrying. In comparison, of the sixteen states that did not pass compulsory sterilization laws, only 43.75 percent had laws that prevented certain classes of citizens from marrying; in other words, states with marriage restriction laws were twice as a likely to pass compulsory sterilization laws.5 Therefore compulsory sterilization laws emerged from the earlier marriage restriction laws, and the laws targeted the same groups of citizens. The Tenacity of Compulsory Sterilization Law Advocates In...

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