1907

Indiana established the first official sterilization program in U.S. California passed its law in 1909 and established “the world’s most aggressive program at the time,” sterilizing over 2,500 people in the first 10 years (Bruirnius, ch 2). “By 1931, thirty states had performed the sterilization of over 12,000 men (via vasectomy) and women (via fallopian tube severing). Half of these were in California” (Rutherford, 64). In all 32 states legalized eugenic sterilization at some point, with number of recorded sterilizations ranging from 30 in Arizona to 20,000 in California (Ladd-Taylor, Intro). By 1933, when Hitler came to power, 18 American states had passed eugenic laws, “an inspiration to the German eugenicists” (122). American eugenicist Madison Grant’s bestselling The Passing of the Great Race, “a treatise of pseudoscientic White superiority that asserted a hierarchy of the world’s peoples” (66), was described by Hitler as his “Bible” (Rutherford, 67, 122). The Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring, which took effect on Jan 1, 1934, “cited California and Virginia’s laws as precedents” (Hansen & King, 148). “In its policy implications, negative eugenics in Nazi Germany was, right up to the first murder of mentally handicapped Germans, indistinguishable from negative eugenics in democratic America” (157).