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138  Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing today, a number of deeply problematic assumptions about certain citizens’ supposed social inadequacies have allowed for the coerced sterilization of tens of thousands of mental health patients and prisoners. In many cases, state wards signed permission forms, but the coercive nature of institutional settings is obvious, and it is difficult to defend the operations as truly voluntary. While physicians had campaigned throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century for the legal authority to sterilize defectives at will, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that legislators seriously considered passing such laws. Between 1907 and 1937, legislators adopted the claims made by an impressive collection of social and natural scientists, health care providers, mental health administrators, and prison authorities, and eventually two-thirds of American states passed compulsory sterilization laws. Based on available records, at least 63,000 state wards were coercively sterilized. The actual number is most certainly higher— perhaps much higher—as some physicians sterilized without state oversight, but because of limited documentation, the total number cannot realistically be estimated. To anyone considering the subject around 1980, it would have seemed that the movement to coercively sterilize certain citizens had ended sometime during the previous decade. The withdrawal of support by many professionals—including physicians, legislators, biologists, and social scientists—combined with the increasing recognition of the racist and sexist motivations for the movement made involuntary sterilization too problematic to be advocated as a solution for any ailment, physical or social. For example, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, feminists publicized the coerced sterilization of women in the United States as well as in Puerto Rico, India, Bangladesh, and Brazil.1 Poor women, they explained, were particularly vulnerable, especially in efforts to reduce the number of people on welfare.2 Moreover, claims by American Indian activists that the The New Coerced Sterilization Movement C o n c l u s i o n Conclusion.qxd 6/20/07 10:04 AM Page 138 Indian Health Service had sterilized “at least 25 percent of Native American women who were between the ages of fifteen and forty-four during the 1970’s” certainly should have effectively ended legislators’ and physicians’ ability to coercively sterilize anyone.3 Attacks on coerced sterilization also became part of the civil rights and black nationalist movements during the 1960s and 1970s. Take, for example, Genocide in Mississippi, published in the mid-1960s by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The twelve-page pamphlet was a reaction against a bill introduced in the Mississippi House of Representatives that would have “penalized the birth of an illegitimate child by imposing a prison sentence of 1 to 3 years on the parents”and was amended to allow“sterilization in lieu of the prison sentence .” The representatives who sponsored the legislation, according to the pamphlet ’s authors, “made no attempt to disguise the anti-Negro nature of the bill.” The pamphlet included not only a reproduction of the bill in question, but also the names and home addresses of every representative who voted for it.4 More recently, Dorothy Robert’s Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty explored the “meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression.”5 While it is evident that coerced sterilization continued well through the 1950s and that there is little evidence to support claims that the Holocaust turned Americans against compulsory sterilization laws after the war, the comparisons between the American eugenics movement and the policies of the Nazis finally wielded powerful rhetorical force in the last decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, biologists and historians alike frequently linked coerced sterilization to the World War II atrocities. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a major revision in many aspects of American history, including radically different views of the history of eugenics and, as demonstrated in Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life, of Nazi atrocities.6 Two decades of Cold War anxieties and the growing conflict in Vietnam generated increasingly critical analyses of America’s past, including the role of progressives in advocating aggressive interventionist policies, especially eugenics. Richard Hofstadter’s criticism of social Darwinism in the 1940s and 1950s grew into a widespread critique of governmental attempts to cultivate a better American population. Mark Haller’s Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, “the first comprehensive history of the rise, fall, and gradual revival of the eugenics...

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