Reply #24: Interestingly enough [View All]

[Southpaw Bookworm]

I'm in the middle of a book called "Barren in the Promised Land" about childlessness in America. I just finished a chapter about the history of involuntary sterilization in the United States. Most of those subjected to this forced surgery were poor women who had been institutionalized on the basis that they were "feeble-minded." The determinant of feeblemindedness: their social class and whether they were considered "promiscuous" (IOW, had been engaged in premarital sex in some form). In one case, a 15-year-old girl was deemed such after her stepfather got her pregnant.