Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States

Breeding Contempt is probably one of the most comprehensive monographs on America’s long, dark experiment with coercive sterilization. Largent traces the idea from its origins in haphazard attempts by doctors to improve the public welfare by eliminating moral and sexual deviants, to its Progressive-era heyday as the cutting edge frontier of applied biological science (and the nexus of power and knowledge that is always created by applied science), and its legal and social challenges and decline through the 50s and 60s.

The even-handed and symmetric history is the strongest part of the book. Largent does not draw clear boundaries between medical/scientific/legal interventions, and between sterilization for punitive, eugenic, and therapeutic purposes, rather exposing as much of the State’s intervention on human bodies as possible. However, two major issues are raised, and not fully resolved: the popular dismantling of the eugenics movement by linking it to the Nazis as a project carried out by scholars and not ordinary Americans, as is the standard history, and the recent return of sterilization for pedophiles, in the form of chemical castration. On the whole, however, this is a fascinating, detailed, very readable, and (mercifully) short scholarly work.