The AVClub ran a story about Dakota Johnson starring in a film about Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme Court decision in which involuntary sterilization was upheld by an 8-1 vote. This case is most famous for Oliver Wendell Holmes’ now infamous rejoinder defending the involuntary sterilization of “mental defectives” by writing that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Unfortunately, the AVClub’s headline–Dakota Johnson to tell the fucked-up true story of the government sterilizing “unfit” women”–reinforces a popular idea that it was women alone who were the victims of this practice. On a Facebook discussion of this, people were genuinely confused as to whether or not men had also been the victims of forced sterilization. The answer to that, of course, is yes.
It’s hard to find exact statistics, but I tracked down some details in Rebecca Kluchin’s 2011 book, Fit To Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights, 1950-1980. On page 17 of Kluchin’s book, she writes,
Women accounted for 42 percent of sterilizations between 1907 and 1920, but 58 percent of all sterilizations between 1920 and 1940. By 1961, 61 percent of the 62,162 total eugenic sterilizations performed in the United States involved women.