State-sponsored sterilization

What these people had in mind was the raising of the genetic good through... forced "asexualization" of the lesser elements of society--forced sterilization of inmates in state-run mental and correctional institutions...

The Human Betterment Society put the issue quite simply in their slim little pamphlet, Human Sterilization--to save ourselves from "race degeneration" society had to act and restrict 'defective" men and women from bearing and rearing children... the country was burdened by as many as 18 Million people with mental disease, who "put a charge and a tax on the population" and who would "cost a billion dollars a year" to take care of...

Dr. William Hutton makes the case for the humanitarian treatment of the treatment espoused in the title of his A Brief for the Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded (1936). "It would be unjust and anti-social to withhold the privilege of sterilization from the victims of mental disorders (the insanities)..."(emphasis mine). He dives into the deep-end of the sterilization issue, making the cse for dealing with the "blind, deaf-mutes, haemophilicacs and brachydactyly (deformed fingers)" in the same manner...

Some states--like Kansas--reached across these lines into the lives of epileptics; Michigan did not hunt for epileptics but did so for "imbeciles". Oregon seemed to cast the widest net, including the "feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts" found in any institution maintained at the public's expense who condition was found to be "inadvisable for procreation".

Further details at Ptak Science Books