The government has a history of taking over people’s reproductive future.  In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States promoted efforts to “breed better human beings”.  The pseudoscience,  called eugenics included forced abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning.

When the Nazis went on trial after World War II, for war crimes in Nuremberg, they justified their mass sterilizations by citing the United States as their inspiration.  And just as the rich and powerful promoted the Nazi Holocaust, in the United States, eugenics was driven by the elite.

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill; Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger founder of Planned Parenthood; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; novelist H. G. Wells;  playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. 

It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor.   Nobel Prize winners gave their support, as well as the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. Eugenics was even introduced into the curriculum at high schools and universities.  Work was done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins.

The belief that there was a gene pool... homosexuals, Negroes, foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates, the unfit, and the "feeble minded...  leading to the deterioration of the human race was widely shared:

H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens."

Theodore Roosevelt said that "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind."  

George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

Even though the eugenic description of human life reflected political and social prejudices rather than scientific facts, eugenicists effectively lobbied for social legislation to keep racial and ethnic groups separate, to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and to sterilize people considered "genetically unfit."

Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying. Eugenics were applied to bring about more restrictive state laws banning interracial marriage: the so-called anti-miscegenation laws. The most famous example was Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned this law in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, and declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

The first American entity associated officially with eugenics, the Immigration Restriction League lobbied for a literacy test for immigrants.  Literacy test bills were vetoed by Presidents in 1897, 1913 and 1915; eventually, President Wilson's second veto was overruled by Congress in 1917.  

Eugenicists were then able to influence  the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924.  The Act restricted the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans as well as prohibited the immigration of Middle Easterners, East Asians and Asian Indians. 

He wrote:

The Immigration Act of 1924 also identified other undesirables banned from entering the country, including  “homosexuals”, “idiots”, “feeble-minded persons”, "criminals", “epileptics”, “insane persons”, alcoholics, “professional beggars”, all persons “mentally or physically defective”, polygamists, and anarchists. It barred all immigrants over the age of sixteen who were illiterate; people from  eastern Asia and the Pacific Islands.  The Act governed American immigration policy for 40 years, until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass eugenics legislation, followed soon after in 1909 by Washington and California. More than 30 states would enact eugenics legislation.  Most operations were performed  to prevent reproduction, but Oregon and North Dakota had laws which called for the use of castration.

Sterilization rates across the country were relatively low until a1927 Supreme Court legitimized the forced sterilization of patients at a Virginia home for the mentally retarded. The number of sterilizations performed per year increased until another Supreme Court case, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 1942, complicated the legal situation by ruling that sterilization of criminals could not exempt white-collar criminals.

After World War II, public opinion turned against eugenics and sterilization programs because of the connection with the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany.  In the end, over 65,000 individuals were sterilized in 33 states under state compulsory sterilization programs in the United States. The Oregon Board of Eugenics, later renamed the Board of Social Protection, existed until 1983, with the last forcible sterilization occurring in 1981.   

Too many have either forgotten or never learned the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust. So, when today’s Americans witness widespread violations of human rights  by our country’s leaders, they don’t recognize them for what they are.  Evil is hard to confront, especially on such a far-reaching scale.  But we must not have naïve faith in the decency of our leaders.  It is totally unwarranted by any serious examination of the facts.

The U.S. Constitution provides no guarantee against tyranny. It only provides a master plan that enables us to recognize when our rights are in jeopardy and exercise sufficient vigilance to maintain them.

Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement

Payment Set for Those Sterilized in Program