Draft:Asexualization Acts
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- singular Asexualization Act to redirect here if mainspace
- wikilinks in Frederick W. Hatch (psychiatrist), Eugenics in California and Sonoma Developmental Center
The Asexualization Acts were a series of eugenic compulsory sterilization laws enacted in California beginning in 1909. The legislation authorized officials in state hospitals, psychiatric institutions, and prisons to sterilize patients and inmates. The original statute was replaced in 1913 and the law was expanded in 1917.
California was the third U.S. state, after Indiana and Washington, to enact a sterilization law. Its program became influential within the American eugenics movement and was promoted in the United States and abroad. Sterilizations declined after the mid-twentieth century, and the remaining statutory authority for eugenic sterilization was repealed in 1979. California formally apologized for its eugenics program in 2003 and established a compensation program for those affected in 2021.
Background
[edit]During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenics gained support among some American physicians, scientists and social reformers. Eugenicists argued that characteristics including intellectual disability, mental illness, criminality and other traits they saw as socially undesirable were inherited. Sterilization was seen as a way of preventing people classified as "unfit" from having children.[1][2]
California's legislation was developed by Frederick W. Hatch, secretary of the California State Commission in Lunacy.[3]
Legislation
[edit]1909 act
[edit]On April 26, 1909, Governor James Gillett signed An Act to Permit Asexualization of Inmates of the State Hospitals and the California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble-Minded Children, and of Convicts in the State Prisons, Chapter 720 of the Statutes of California.[3]
The statute authorized medical officials to perform sterilization operations on some institutionalized people. For patients in state hospitals and the California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble-Minded Children, procedures were authorized when medical officials believed that it would improve the patient's "physical, mental, or moral condition".[3]
The statute also applied to some prisoners, including repeat offenders and prisoners serving life sentences who were considered by officials to exhibit what the statute described as "moral and sexual depravity".[4]
1913 act
[edit]The 1909 statute was repealed and replaced in 1913. The new legislation expanded the state's authority to perform sterilizations, and strengthened the role of the State Commission in Lunacy in determining who could undergo the procedure.[3]
Under the revised law, authorities could order the sterilization of certain patients before their discharge. Consent from the patient was not required.[3][5]
The 1913 legislation also provided greater legal protection to officials and physicians who performed sterilizations.[3]
1917 amendments
[edit]California's legislature expanded the sterilization legislation in 1917. The amended law permitted sterilization before discharge of institutionalized people considered to have a mental condition that "may have been inherited and is likely to be transmitted to descendants".[3] It also applied to people classified at the time as having various degrees of "feeble-mindedness", "perversion", departures from what officials considered "normal mentality", or certain syphilitic conditions.[3][6]
Historians have identified the 1913 and particularly the 1917 legislation as marking transition from ostensibly therapeutic justifications for sterilization toward explicitly eugenic ones.[3][6][7]
Implementation
[edit]Sterilization under the 1909 law was initially infrequent but increased substantially during the late 1910s and 1920s. By 1921, California institutions had performed 2,248 sterilizations, accounting for more than 80 percent of those recorded in the U.S.[3]
The program was mainly concentrated in state psychiatric hospitals and institutions, particularly Sonoma State Home and Stockton State Hospital.[3] Procedures included vasectomy for men and salpingectomy for women.[8]
The people sterilized were disproportionately drawn from populations already subject to institutional control. Scholars have emphasized the importance of gender, disability, class and race in determining how eugenic policies were implemented.[9] Research by Stern and Natalie Lira has found that people of Mexican origin were disproportionately represented among those sterilized in California institutions, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century.[10]
Women increasingly constituted a substantial proportion of those sterilized. Historian Wendy Kline connects this development to changing eugenic concerns about women's sexuality, motherhood and perceived social dependency.[9]
Influence
[edit]California became one of the principal centers of the American eugenics movement. Eugenicists Ezra Seymour Gosney and Paul Popenoe established the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena in 1928 and used California's sterilization program to promote similar legislation elsewhere, including outside of the United States.[3]
Gosney and Popenoe's 1929 book Sterilization for Human Betterment presented approximately 6,000 California operations as evidence for the social and economic benefits of eugenic sterilization.[11] California's program became influential among proponents of sterilization in other jurisdictions in the United States and abroad.[12]
Legal developments and repeal
[edit]The Supreme Court upheld Virginia's compulsory sterilization statute in Buck v. Bell (1927), which provided constitutional support for state eugenic sterilization laws.[13]
In Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942), the Supreme Court invalidated an Oklahoma sterilization statute, holding that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause. The decision did not overrule Buck v. Bell, but placed greater constitutional constraints on sterilization statutes.[14]
California substantially revised its sterilization legislation in 1951, removing some of the categories previously used to authorize procedures. The number of eugenic sterilizations declined considerably after the mid-twentieth century.[3]
The remaining statutory authority for compulsory eugenic sterilization in California was repealed in 1979.[15] By then, approximately 20,000 people had been sterilized in California, the largest recorded number of any U.S. state.[15]
Later recognition
[edit]In 2003, California issued an official apology for its role in the eugenics movement and the sterilization of thousands of people under state authority.[15]
Historical research in the twenty-first century has increasingly examined the experiences of those subjected to the program. Scholars have characterized California's sterilization policies within the broader history of reproductive justice, disability discrimination, racial inequality and state control over reproduction.[15][16]
In 2021, California established a compensation program for surviving victims of state-sponsored eugenic sterilization, alongside people sterilized without proper consent while incarcerated in California prisons after the formal eugenics program had ended.[17]
References
[edit]- ↑ Kline, Wendy (2001). Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-22502-2.
- ↑ Largent, Mark A. (2008). Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-4182-2.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Stern, Alexandra Minna (2005). "Sterilized in the Name of Public Health: Race, Immigration, and Reproductive Control in Modern California". American Journal of Public Health. 95 (7): 1128–1138. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2004.041608. PMC 1449330. PMID 15983269.
- ↑ Gosney, Ezra S.; Popenoe, Paul (1929). Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909–1929. New York: Macmillan.
- ↑ Aronoff, Jacob Broches (1927). "The Constitutionality of Asexualization Legislation in the United States". St. John's Law Review. 1 (2): 153–176.
- 1 2 Braslow, Joel T. (1997). Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20547-5.
- ↑ Braslow, Joel T. (1997). Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-20547-5.
- ↑ Gosney, Ezra S.; Popenoe, Paul (1929). Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909–1929. Macmillan.
- 1 2 Kline, Wendy (2001). Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-22502-2.
- ↑ Lira, Natalie; Stern, Alexandra Minna (2014). "Mexican Americans and Eugenic Sterilization: Resisting Reproductive Injustice in California, 1920–1950". Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. 39 (2): 9–34.
- ↑ Gosney, Ezra S.; Popenoe, Paul (1929). Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909–1929. New York: Macmillan.
- ↑ Kühl, Stefan (1994). The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-508260-9.
- ↑ Lombardo, Paul A. (1985). "Three Generations, No Imbeciles: New Light on Buck v. Bell". New York University Law Review. 60: 30–62.
- ↑ Lombardo, Paul A. (2008). Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-9010-9.
- 1 2 3 4 Stern, Alexandra Minna (2017). "California's Sterilization Survivors: An Estimate and Call for Redress". American Journal of Public Health. 107 (1): 50–54. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2016.303489. PMC 5308144. PMID 27854540.
- ↑ Novak, Nicole L.; Lira, Natalie; O'Connor, Kate E.; Harlow, Siobán D.; Kardia, Sharon L. R.; Stern, Alexandra Minna (2018). "Disproportionate Sterilization of Latinos Under California's Eugenic Sterilization Program, 1920–1945". American Journal of Public Health. 108 (5): 611–613. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2018.304369. PMC 5888070. PMID 29565671.
- ↑ McCormick, Erin (July 19, 2021). "Survivors of California's forced sterilizations: 'It's like my life wasn't worth anything'". The Guardian. Retrieved September 9, 2026.