How Utah became the No. 1 state for forced sterilization
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Image of Laws of the State of Utah, 1925, via Utah Government Digital Library
A century ago Monday, forcible sterilization became legal in Utah.
- This is Old News, our weekly competency evaluation of our forebears.
What drove the news: In 1925, the Legislature authorized directors of the prison, Utah State Hospital and some other institutions to sterilize inmates and patients "afflicted with habitual sexual criminal tendencies, insanity, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy."
- When the state opened a job training school for people with disabilities in the 1930s, the law was amended to include students there, too.
By the numbers: "At least 830 men, women and children were coercively sterilized in Utah" during the 60 years that the law was in effect, per a 2023 study by the University of Utah.
- Many were teenagers; at least one was a child younger than 10.
The big picture: Sterilization is one of many 20th-century eugenics programs now held up as a catastrophe of medical ethics.
- Meanwhile, many victims did not exhibit even the heritable maladies those programs purported to address.
Case in point: In 1928, a teenage girl told her "local religious leader" that she'd been raped repeatedly by a family member, U. researchers wrote in the 2023 study.
- The faith leader did not believe her, and she was admitted to the Utah State Hospital. There, she was forcibly sterilized for being diagnosed as a "moron."
- Later, the religious leader admitted she'd probably been a victim of human trafficking, researchers found.
Flashback: Utah's sterilizations peaked in the early 1940s, with more than 120 operations from 1941 to 1943, the researchers found.
The intrigue: Most states dialed back their sterilization efforts in the 1940s and '50s after learning about the horrific outcomes of eugenics in Nazi Germany, researchers wrote.
- But in Utah, lawmakers just changed the rationale to keep sterilizing people. In 1961, a new law allowed sterilization for any institutionalized person with the same disorders from the 1925 law if they were "probably incurable and unlikely to be able to perform properly the functions of parenthood."
- Under the new law, forced sterilizations continued well into the 1970s.
What they said: Utah sterilized a greater share of its residents than any other state in 1947, which the Rocky Mountain Medical Journal lauded as an "important achievement in public health."
The latest: The state discontinued sterilizations under those laws in 1974, per the study.
- But a rarely used law permitting forced sterilization in some cases remains on the books, the Salt Lake Tribune reported in 2022.
- U. researchers estimated more than 50 survivors of Utah's forced sterilization programs were still alive as of 2023.