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96  Before the late 1920s, the only organized resistance to compulsory sterilization laws came from local or regional antisterilization groups. Take, for example, Lora Little’s Anti-Sterilization League, which organized in 1913 to oppose Oregon’s compulsory sterilization law. Little’s opposition to sterilization was part of her broader animosity toward the medical profession motivated by the death of her seven-year-old son. She believed that her son had died from a reaction to a smallpox vaccination, and she equated compulsory sterilization and compulsory vaccination . She“considered doctors to be little more than power- and profit-hungry oppressors who, operating with faulty ideas, only made people sicker.” Little led the drive for a referendum on Oregon’s sterilization law, which ultimately overturned the law and prevented the implementation of coercive sterilization in the state for several years.1 Organized resistance to compulsory sterilization laws was limited to local or regional opposition because of the nature of the laws themselves. Issues of public health and oversight of both medicine and education—the aspects of government for which compulsory sterilization was relevant—were under the purview of state, rather the federal, governments. The sterilization laws themselves and the actual practice of coerced sterilization, both in terms of its targets and the frequency with which it was applied, varied enough to make the basis for opposition to them differ considerably from state to state. The disconnected collection of sterilization opponents needed something that would unite them in opposition to compulsory sterilization laws, which finally came with the decision in Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmation of states’abilities to enact compulsory sterilization laws. Buck v. Bell provided a rallying cry, especially among Catholics, and it galvanized opposition to compulsory sterilization, which was led by the only nationwide organization to oppose compulsory sterilization, the Roman Catholic Church.2 Buck v. Bell and the First Organized Resistance to Coerced Sterilization c h a p t e r 4 Chap-04.qxd 6/20/07 10:03 AM Page 96 organized resistance to coerced sterilization 97 Voices of Opposition before Buck As ardent as were the supporters of sterilization for the prevention of crime in the late nineteenth century, there were some equally fervent opponents to the procedures, and they occasionally published letters and articles in medical journals . They were not, however, particularly effective.Among the first opponents to publish in the professional literature was J. W. Lockhart, a medical doctor in St. John,Washington,who in 1895 wrote in the St. Louis Courier of Medicine describing his opposition to“bodily mutilation.”Society could be made safe not through sterilization, but only through“the education of its component parts above a certain moral standard, demanded and maintained by public sentiment.” Lockhart ignored eugenic arguments and, applying the same sort of biological analogies that would be common a decade later, explained that it was“useless to lop off the withered branches while the worm is eating away the root of the tree.” Time spent inventing new punishments for crime would be much better spent developing the institutions that educated citizens and prevented crime. Ultimately, he argued,“the medical profession should lead in this great reform.”3 Many of the authors who opposed some aspect of coerced sterilization believed that the approach still had some merit, and they would often criticize certain uses of it while praising others. Take, for example, the physician A. C. Corr, who wrote “Emasculation and Ovariotomy as a Penalty for Crime and as a Reformatory Agency”in 1895. Like Lockhart, Corr generally argued against the use of sexual surgeries as a punishment for the commission of crime, emphasizing that “the criminal tendency is a mental complex, a moral imbecility, congenital or hereditary, but in either respect largely the result of environment and synergistic influences.” But even though he generally opposed laws that would bring compulsory sterilization to bear on convicted criminals, he agreed that emasculation should “be applied as a punishment—precautionary—for rape, because one who has such a perverted impulse should, for the safety of society, be rendered unable to commit the deed involved.”4 This sort of limited rejection of compulsory sterilization , arguing against it for the vast majority of targeted individuals but holding out some truly incorrigible group that deserved the scalpel, was common in the literature into the second half of the twentieth century. Even the most aggressive opponents of coerced sterilization often set aside some particularly problematic group...

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