User:Mopchi/sandbox

Sterilization
Sterilization of the socially inadequate was taken as the best method of preserving the superiority of the American society and the only way of removing the trait in question.

Birth control was not considered as a means of preventing the procreation of the feeble-minded. The intelligent Americans were already using birth control and the feeble-minded were not provided with the medication to keep the distinction between them and the fit.

Hundreds of forced sterilizations were performed by Albert Priddy from the Virginia Colony prior to 1924, including the sterilization of a sixteen-year-old girl who was considered immoral with mental defects because she had talked to young boys frequently. In 1916 the case of Mallory v. Priddy, where Willie Mallory and her daughter Jessie were falsely arrested for running a brothel and were sterilized due to the belief of their feeble-mindedness and immorality, was the first instance of when Priddy has publicly carried out his sterilization program.

In the first half of the 20th century, a diagnosis of "feeble-mindedness, in any of its grades" was a common criterion for many states in the United States, which embraced eugenics as a progressive measure, to mandate the compulsory sterilization of such patients. In the 1927 US Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes closed the 8–1 majority opinion upholding the sterilization of Carrie Buck, with the phrase, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Buck, her mother and daughter were all classified as feeble-minded.

Definition
The American psychologist Henry H. Goddard, who coined the term moron, was the director of the Vineland Training School (originally the Vineland Training School for Backward and Feeble-minded Children) at Vineland, New Jersey. Goddard was known for strongly postulating that "feeble-mindedness" was a hereditary trait, most likely caused by a single recessive gene. Goddard rang the eugenic "alarm bells" in his 1912 work, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, about those in the population who carried the recessive trait despite outward appearances of normality. Later in 1914, eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin created Laughlin's Model Law that also demonstrated the heritability of this recessive gene that was believed to be causing feeble-mindedness and influenced further passages of laws rooting from eugenics.