If a state chooses to make sterilization a requirement to receive welfare, that is their right, but to force mutilation on persons because they are deformed, or demented, or diseased, or deaf, or dumb is contemptible, criminal, and crazy.
How would you respond to a proposed law that would give the states authority to force women to be sterilized if they were promiscuous or poor? Or men could be forced to have a vasectomy if they were prisoners or inmates in an institution? No doubt, sane, sensitive people would be horrified and respond, “That could never happen in America.”
But it could and did happen in America decades ago! During the 1890s to 1920, America was the first nation to perform compulsory sterilizations with one purpose of saving money. While it is only prudent to plan for the future to guarantee a nation will continue to meet its financial obligations, only a scientist or politician with a Frankenstein compulsion would mutilate a human for life to save money. Well, how about doing it to clean up the gene pool? If doing harm to a relative few individuals would save millions of lives in the future, what’s to criticize?
Indiana became the first state to enact sterilization legislation in 1907, followed by California and Washington in 1909. Several other states followed them into a deep, dark, devious pit. After the National Socialists in Germany implemented their controlled society in the 1920s and 1930s, maiming human bodies became less acceptable, if not criminal in the free world.
In 1920, Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy, waved the Nazi flag—at least he philosophically waved it. He thought the eugenic practices of the Third Reich were “scientific” and “humanitarian.” He was a member of the KKK and a founding member (along with Margaret Sanger) and a board member of the American Birth Control League that became Planned Parenthood in 1942. It has a sordid, sad, and systemic history of killing and maiming babies.