By the late 1940s, eugenics’ days seemed to be numbered. Discoveries in genetics in the 1920s and 1930s had challenged the hereditarian argument, new psychoanalytic methods provided psychiatrists and psychologists with greater optimism about their ability to treat mental illness, and Nazi atrocities cast eugenics and eugenic sterilization into ill repute. One by one, the foundations of eugenics began to weaken, and its crowning achievement – coerced sterilization – faced its most serious challenge.

As it did, pro-sterilization advocates, who were still overwhelmingly eugenicists, did not quietly retreat from their project; for many of them, it amounted to a lifetime of work. In institutions, many superintendents and boards of eugenics carried on much as before, except that, in many cases, their level of activity expanded. But, for public intellectuals and advocates of sterilization, the challenges were more enduring. They were compelled to regroup both politically and intellectually in recognition of the severe threat to their project’s credibility posed by the German experience.