Here’s a little dinner conversation for your Valentine’s Day date: Forced sterilization, yea or nay?
After the horrible news recently about a Lake Stevens couple who allegedly abandoned their children in filthy conditions, several people on our Facebook page suggested they were prime candidates for sterilization. So we were curious: Would people really want the government to have the power to sterilize people who commit crimes against their children?
We asked that question in our unscientific poll at HeraldNet.com and the response was positively Orwellian. A resounding 68 percent said yes.
Now, I’m sure we all remember the 1920s and ‘30s when Washington laws authorized forced sterilization. Eugenics were all the rage in the Roaring ‘20s, and the prevailing opinion was that mentally ill and “feeble-minded” people should be weeded out of the gene pool. Almost all of those sterilized were women because, hey, this was the 1920s. State law also allowed sterilization as punishment for certain crimes, but enforcement of that was spotty.
This went on for a couple of decades in our state, where at least 685 people were sterilized, according to a University of Vermont study. Thousands more were sterilized under similar laws across the country.
The Supreme Court eventually addressed this in 1942 when a vasectomy was Oklahoma’s prescribed punishment for a chicken thief. Cooler heads prevailed, the scalpel went back in the drawer, and the court’s ruling all but ended forced sterilization as punishment. Meanwhile, eugenics fell out of favor thanks to the Nazis. Now you can only find that kind of government power in an authoritarian paradise such as Uzbekistan.
Hopefully we can chalk that 68 percent ‘yes’ vote in our poll up to knee-jerk emotion. Yes, the prospect of those people continuing to produce more children is scary, but history says the government can be even scarier.
— Doug Parry, Herald Web editor: dparry@heraldnet.com
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