Monday, February 03, 2014

Coercively

Although the ERO ["Eugenics Records Office", much more than the title suggests] stopped functioning in 1939, America's eugenic laws did not. Tens of thousands of Americans continued to be forcibly sterilized, institutionalized and legally prevented from marriage on the basis of racial and eugenic laws. During the 1940s, some 15,000 Americans were coercively sterilized, almost a third of them in California. In the fifties, about ten thousand were sterilized. In the sixties, thousands more were sterilized. All told, an estimated 70,000 were eugenically sterilized in the first seven decades of the twentieth century; the majority were women. California consistently outdistanced every other state.

--Edwin Black, "War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race", p. 398

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