Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950-1980

Chapter 1: From Eugenics to Neo-eugenics

Chapter 1 10 Eugenics developed in America at the turn of the twentieth century as a response to cultural, social, and political anxieties specific to the era. As the decades advanced and the country experienced a massive depression and two world wars, eugenic ideas and practices evolved as well. Positive eugenics, or the encouragement of “fit” women’s reproduction, experienced a revival during the baby boom, but only a few eugenically driven institutions, notably Paul Popenoe’s American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR), supported this trend. Popenoe’s emphasis on “fit” women’s reproduction did not replace previous efforts to quell the reproduction of “unfit” individuals through compulsory sterilization laws, immigration quotas, and antimiscegenation legislation. These practices continued to some extent in the second half of the twentieth century; but with the exception of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization (AVS), the American Eugenics Society (AES), and the Pioneer Fund, few of the older, traditional eugenics laboratories and organizations remained intact after World War II, and the number of compulsory surgeries declined significantly after the war.1 By the 1960s, the formal eugenics movement had crumbled, but eugenic ideas and practices remained embedded in American society, culture, and politics. The eugenicists and eugenic organizations that remained in existence after World War II continued to revise their standards of reproductive fitness to reflect contemporary social concerns about welfare, overpopulation, civil rights, Mexican immigration, and the sexual revolution. These standards were both similar to those advanced by eugenicists in the first half of the century and at the same time distinct from these earlier ideas because they responded to very historically specific concerns and trends. Not quite eugenic anymore, From Eugenics to Neo-eugenics these new ideas and practices of social engineering are best described as neo-eugenic. Neo-eugenic physicians, social workers, and politicians capitalized on the changing use of sterilization to put these new politics into practice. Between roughly 1965 and 1975, sterilization was transformed from a eugenic procedure to one of the most popular methods of contraception in America. In 1965, roughly 13 percent of all married couples had undergone sterilization for contraceptive purposes. The percentage increased to about 18 percent by 1970 and soared to about 29 percent in 1973. By 1975, 7.9 million Americans had undergone sterilization, and sterilization had become the most popular method of contraception used by married couples.2 The AVS in particular strove to make contraceptive sterilization—tubal ligation or vasectomy undertaken solely for birth control purposes—acceptable to physicians and available to the public, especially the poor, with the hope that access to the surgery would prompt “unfit” citizens to choose permanent contraception. The AVS stood at the forefront of the transition between eugenics and neoeugenics and at the head of the campaign to legitimize contraceptive sterilization among physicians and the public. Not only did the organization persist in the postwar era after most of its contemporaries had disbanded, but it was the vanguard of a new movement to legitimize contraceptive sterilization and, in this way, deliberately and publicly strove to modify popular standards of reproductive fitness and to transform medical practice and public policy to accommodate these changes. In the 1950s and 1960s, the former eugenic organization repackaged its efforts to improve the reproductive fitness of Americans in order to reflect postwar and post–baby boom social trends and concerns. The AVS’s campaign to legitimize voluntary sterilization set it apart from the AIFR, the AES, and the Pioneer Fund and makes it an appropriate lens through which to view the transition from eugenics to neo-eugenics. A Brief History of Eugenics Eugenics is the ideology and practice of selective breeding that encourages the reproduction of individuals deemed fit (positive eugenics) and discourages the reproduction of individuals deemed unfit (negative eugenics). Definitions of fitness have changed over time; however, American eugenicists have consistently measured reproductive fitness according to economic status, race, ethnicity, criminality, illegitimacy, intelligence, and sexual deviance.3 The English scientist Francis Galton first developed the concept of eugenics in 1869, although he officially coined the term in 1883. In his 1869 publication Hereditary Genius, Galton argued that behavior and talent, like physical attributes, From Eugenics to Neo-eugenics 11 were hereditary traits. His study found that reputable families graced with money, education, and opportunity produced more economically and socially privileged children than their lower-class, uneducated counterparts...