Compulsory Sterilization and Reproductive Rights

Paper Summary:

This in-depth paper outlines the history of eugenic policies against mentally disabled persons in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century and examines how such policies have been expanded to include minorities, especially poor women. It show these eugenic policies continue in the United States today via limitations on the reproductive rights of welfare recipients. The paper includes explanations of fallacies of arguments used to support these policies, and concludes that these policies unfairly discriminate against women.

From the Paper:

"While the horrors committed in Nazi Germany forced the United States to reevaluate some of its more extreme eugenic tendencies, policymakers have failed to this day to examine some of the most basic ideologies that led to the original adoption of the eugenic measures. Unfortunately, the history of forced sterilization in the United States in the twentieth century continues to the present day, even to the point of pervading the debate on welfare reform. These arguments about the control of the reproductive rights of women receiving welfare aid are detrimental to the rights of women. It is therefore necessary that issues concerning the reproductive rights of women receiving welfare be eliminated from all discourse on the topic of welfare "reform."

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