Very important article . Very hard for me to read at times. Here is my contribution to your efforts.
My Autistic Life — 03 : Labels have consequences.
Because I was a “retard”, my father had me sterilized.
It's "A short history lesson on “forced sterilization” in America". Here are a few samples.
Would it surprise you that the idea of forced sterilization goes back to the 19th century. That sterilization’s first advocates were physicians who saw it as both a punishment and a treatment for criminal behavior.
Gideon Lincecum in an 1849 bill in the Texas legislature, called for the castration of criminals. Castration was represented as therapeutic and as punitive. Furthermore, some saw it as a solution to perceived problems of heredity and society, especially those problems with sexual or racial dimensions.
While castration would lose its popularity with the advent of the vasectomy in 1897, it set the stage for later eugenic sterilization campaigns.
In 1907, reflecting the eugenicists’ influence, states began enacting laws allowing involuntary sterilization of the developmentally disabled.
Indiana was the first. Thirty-one states followed suit. State-sanctioned sterilizations reached their peak in the 1930s and 1940s but continued and, in some states, rose during the 1950s and 1960s.
The United States was an international leader in eugenics. Its sterilization laws actually informed Nazi Germany. The Third Reich’s 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” was modeled on laws in Indiana and California. Under this law, the Nazis sterilized approximately 400,000 children and adults, mostly Jews and other “undesirables,” labeled “defective.”
In 1927 the issue made its way to the Supreme Court.
A 1927 Supreme Court ruling upheld these laws. In Buck v Bell, a case of an institutionalized woman who had given birth to an illegitimate child, the court ruled that forced sterilization was constitutional under certain circumstances. Justice Holmes’ opinion read:
It is better…if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or…let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those…manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles is enough.
Buck v Bell unleashed a wave of forced sterilizations.
Buck v Bell is still "the law of the land".
Between 1907 and 1963, more than 60,000 Americans, mostly women, were sterilized without their consent in institutional settings.
Analysis shows that from 1950 to 1966, Black women were sterilized at more than three times the rate of white women and more than 12 times the rate of white men. This pattern reflected the ideas that Black women were not capable of being good parents and poverty should be managed with reproductive constraint.
In the 1960s and 1970s, new federal programs like Medicaid also started funding non-consensual sterilizations. More than 100,000 Black, Latino and Indigenous women were affected.
During the 1970s, the forced sterilization of Black women was so common in the American South that it was sometimes referred to as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Forced sterilizations Never Stopped. We still do this.
