workingclasshistory:

On this day, 26 April 1909, California became the second state in the US to pass a eugenics law, enabling the state to forcibly sterilise convicted criminals, and people considered “feeble-minded”.
The California law was even stricter than that introduced in Indiana, as rather than just sterilising people, the law enabled the state to castrate men and remove women’s ovaries, both permanently sterilising them and causing a host of other issues.
People with mental illness, people who had been convicted of more than three crimes, people with sexually-transmitted diseases, or people who supposedly exhibited “sexual or moral perversions”, could be sterilised under the act. These “perversions” included women who had sex without being married. The act was passed unanimously by the state assembly, and had only one dissenting vote in the senate.
In the subsequent decade the law was amended to focus more on sterilising mentally ill people rather than castrating prisoners.
The eugenicist movement in the US inspired the German Nazi party, who invited US eugenicists to local conferences, where information about California’s law was circulated.
While the defeat of the Nazis at the end of World War II caused widespread revulsion at the idea of eugenics, which had previously been popular in the West, California continued to forcibly sterilise and castrate people up to the 1960s. Protests also began against the eugenics programme in the 1950s and 60s, often involving Black and Mexican participants.
In total, the state of California sterilised at least 20,108 people – more than any other state. People of Mexican origin made up around 8% of those sterilised, and while Black people only made up 1% of California’s population, they accounted for 4% of those who were sterilised.
Eventually, California repealed the law in 1979, but it continued to sterilise some women in prison without their consent.
More: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/11261/california-eugenics-law https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=615531520620067&set=a.602588028581083&type=3