User:Canoroman.edgar/Compulsory sterilization

Further information: Eugenics in the United States, Sterilization law in the United States, and Sterilization of Native American women

A map from a 1929 Swedish royal commission report displays the U.S. states that had implemented sterilization legislation by then

During the Progressive Era (c. 1890 to 1920), the United States was the first country to concertedly undertake compulsory sterilization programs for the purpose of eugenics. Thomas C. Leonard, professor at Princeton University, describes American eugenics and sterilization as ultimately rooted in economic arguments and further as a central element of Progressivism alongside minimum wage laws, restricted immigration, and the introduction of pension programs. The heads of the programs were avid proponents of eugenics and frequently argued for their programs which achieved some success nationwide mainly in the first half of the 20th century.

Eugenics had two essential components. First, its advocates accepted as axiomatic that a range of mental and physical handicaps—blindness, deafness, and many forms of mental illness—were, if not entirely, hereditary in cause. Second, they assumed that these scientific hypotheses could be used as the basis of social engineering across several policy areas, including family planning, education, and immigration. The most direct policy implications of eugenic thought were that "mental defectives" should not produce children, since they would only replicate these deficiencies, and that such individuals from other countries should be kept out of the polity.The principal targets of the American sterilization programs were intellectually disabled people and the mentally ill, but also targeted under many state laws were the deaf, the blind, people with epilepsy, and the physically deformed. While the claim was that the focus was the mentally ill and disabled, the definition of this during that time was much different from today's. At this time, there were many women that were sent to institutions due to people thinking women were  "feeble-minded" because they were thought to be promiscuous or became pregnant while unmarried.

A relative minority of sterilizations targeting crime took place in prisons and other penal institutions. In the end, over 65,000 individuals were sterilized in 33 states under state compulsory sterilization programs in the United States, without the perspectives of ethnic minorities.

The first state to introduce a compulsory sterilization bill was Michigan, in 1897, but the proposed law failed to pass. Eight years later Pennsylvania's state legislators passed a sterilization bill that was vetoed by the governor. Indiana became the first state to enact sterilization legislation in 1907,followed closely by California and Washington in 1909. Several other states followed, but such legislation remained controversial enough to be defeated in some cases, as in Wyoming in 1934. In the 1920s, Eugenicists were particularly interested in black women in the South and Latina women in the Southwest to break the chain of welfare dependency and curb the population rise of non-white citizens.