On April 9, 1907 the Governor of Indiana signed into law a bill passed by the state legislature that provided for the involuntary sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” Although it was eventually found to be unconstitutional, this law is widely regarded as the first eugenics sterilization legislation passed in the world. – Indiana Eugenics: History and Legacy, 1907-2007 Website
The eugenics movement arrived in America in the early 1900s, and its most prominent early apostles were Charles Davenport (1866-1944), a respected biologist and college professor, and Harry Laughlin (1880-1943), a former school teacher with an interest in breeding. Davenport and Laughlin founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island in 1910. The ERO collected reams of “data” on the human condition, with an emphasis on evidence that would prove the inheritability of such traits as pauperism, mental disability, dwarfism, promiscuity, and criminality. Other examples of “moral stigmata” found in the literature of the day were “conditions” like selfishness, cowardice, vulgarity, laziness, pomposity, and dozens more, which indicate the wide sweep of social-Darwinist ideas (“Moral Stigmata of Degeneration”). This was not a fringe movement — among the many prominent Americans who would come to support negative eugenics to one degree or another were Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger (pioneer crusader for birth control), Herbert Hoover, W. E. B. Du Bois, and (for a time) Clarence Darrow, the famed “attorney for the damned.” Much of the movement’s funding came from such sources as the Carnegie Foundation (which financed Davenport and Laughlin’s ERO), the Rockefeller Foundation, and the fortune of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman.
Even before Davenport, Laughlin, and their growing group of allies pushed eugenics to the fore in the national debate, states were taking action on their own, and in the lead was Indiana. In 1905 the Indiana legislature passed a law forbidding the issuance of marriage licenses to “imbeciles, epileptics, and those of unsound mind” (1905 Laws of Indiana, ch. 241, pp. 215-216). Two years later it passed the first law in the nation mandating the sterilization of certain men and women in state institutions. The preamble to the act gave the justification: “Heredity plays a most important part in the transmission of crime, idiocy and imbecility” (1907 Laws of Indiana, Preamble, ch. 215 p. 377), and the law’s purpose was explicitly stated — “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists …” (1907 Laws of Indiana, ch. 215, p. 377).
The law mandated that “each and every institution in the state, entrusted with the care of confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles” add two skilled staff surgeons who “shall, in conjunction with the chief physician of the institution … examine the mental and physical condition of such inmates as are recommended by the institutional physician and board of managers.” If they concluded that “procreation is inadvisable and there is no probability of improvement of the mental condition of the inmate, it shall be lawful for the surgeons to perform such operation for the prevention of procreation as shall be decided safest and most effective” (1907 Laws of Indiana, ch. 215, p. 37).
The Indiana Supreme Court in 1921 ruled the statute unconstitutional on due-process grounds, but did not hold that coerced sterilization was itself unconstitutional. In 1927 the state legislature tweaked the law to satisfy the court’s procedural criticisms. It is estimated that approximately 2,500 men and women were forcibly sterilized in Indiana before the act was repealed in 1977. A later examination of available records indicated that 1,751 were sterilized due to “mental deficiency” and 667 for “mental illness,” with the last occurring between 1960 and 1963 (Kaelber, “Indiana”).
