1 - Coerced Sterilization
Outcomes, Theories, Methods
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Summary
For almost a century, politicians, lawmakers, doctors, bureaucrats, scientists, and citizens embarked on an ambitious social engineering project: coerced sterilization.
In North America, it began in the 1880s, with one prison doctor’s desire to prevent masturbation among his inmates. In the following decades, hundreds of thousands of people – above all, those deemed to be “feebleminded” and therefore likely to reproduce that trait – were sterilized in dozens of states, provinces, and countries around the world. The United States forcibly sterilized at least 60,000 feebleminded patients from the 1910s to the 1970s; Nazi Germany (the most widely known instance) sterilized approximately 360,000 such individuals in the 1930s; Canada eugenically sterilized approximately 3,000 people (more than 90 percent of such sterilizations occurred in the province of Alberta); and the countries of Scandinavia coercively sterilized 35,500, with tens of thousands more sterilized under quasi-voluntary conditions thereafter. In the United States, the majority of coerced sterilizations occurred within state institutions: chiefly homes for the feebleminded but also in state hospitals and prisons.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sterilized by the StateEugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America, pp. 3 - 26Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
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