Chapter XII: Suggestions as to Application

_The State's humanitarian zeal protects the lives and fosters the fertility of the degenerate._--_A confirmed or hereditary criminal defined._--_Law on the subject of sterilization could at first be permissive._--_It should apply, to begin with, to criminals and the insane._--_Marriage certificates of health should be required._--_Women's readiness to submit to surgical treatment for minor as well as major pelvic diseases._--_Surgically induced sterility of healthy women a greater crime than abortion._--_This danger not remote._

The fertility of the unfit goes on unrestrained by any other check, save vice and misery. The great moral checks have not, and cannot have any place with them. But the State is, by its humanitarian zeal, limiting the scope and diminishing the force of these natural checks amongst all classes of the community, but especially amongst the unfit, so that its policy now fosters the fertility of this class, while it fails to arrest the declining nativity of our best citizens. The greater the fertility of the unfit, the greater the burden the fit have to bear, and the less their fertility.

The State's present policy therefore, fosters the fertility of the unfit, and discourages the fertility of the fit. This disastrous policy must be changed without delay. The State can arrest the gradual degradation of its people, by sterilizing all defective women and the wives of defective men falling into the hands of the law. Mr. Henry M. Boies in "Prisoners and Paupers" suggests life-long isolation. He says:--"It is time however that society should interpose in this propagation of criminals. It is irrational and absurd to occupy our attention and exhaust our liberality with the care of his constantly growing class, without any attempt to restrict its reproduction. This is possible too, without violating any humanitarian instinct, by imprisonment for life; and this seems to be the most practicable solution of the problem in America. As soon as an individual can be identified as an hereditary or chronic criminal, society shall confine him or her in a penitentiary at self-supporting labour for life.

Every State should have an institution, adapted to the safe and secure separation of such from society, where they can be employed at productive labour, without expense to the public, during their natural life. When this is ended with them, the class will become extinct, and not before. Then each generation would only have to take care of its own moral cripples and defectives, without the burden of the constantly increasing inheritance of the past. When upon a third conviction the judicial authorities determine the prisoner to belong to the criminal class, the law should imperatively require the sentence to be the penitentiary for life, whatever the particular crime committed."

M. Boies defines a criminal as one in whom two successive punishments, according to law, have failed to prevent a third offence.

If such a criminal is a woman, she should be offered the alternative of surgical sterility or incarceration during the child bearing period of her life; if a man, his wife should be offered this remedy against the procreation of criminals in exchange for her husband, on the expiry of his sentence, or the protection of divorce.

No woman in the child-bearing period of life should be released from an Asylum, until this operation has been performed. If a man is committed, his wife should have the option of divorce or be sterilized before his release.

A central Board should issue marriage certificates, after consideration of confidential medical reports upon the health, physical condition, and family history of the parties to a proposed marriage contract.

Medical officers should be appointed in the various centres of population by the central Board, and fees on reports should be paid after the manner of Life Insurance fees.

In fact the Life Insurance system would serve as a good model, for the establishment of a system of marriage control, and if questions involving a more detailed family history were added to a typical Life Insurance report form, it could hardly be improved upon, for the purpose of marriage health reports.

If upon consideration of the medical report of the contracting parties, in accordance with the law upon the subject, a certificate of marriage were refused, a certificate of sterilization by tubo-ligature, forwarded to the Board by a Surgeon, should entitle to the marriage certificate.

No law should attempt to step in between two lovers, who have become attached to each other by the bonds of a strong affection, lest a greater evil befall both themselves and society.

A marriage certificate of health should state the complete family history as well as the physical condition of the parties to a proposed marriage, and such certificates should be issued only by the Central Board of Experts, who would receive the medical reports of its own medical officers.

When the principle of artificial sterilization is accepted by the State, the organization necessary to ensure that only the fit shall procreate, will only be a matter of arrangement by experts.

One danger looms ahead however if the operative means of producing artificial sterility are popularised.

Every surgeon of experience knows how readily large numbers of married women encourage surgical treatment for ovarian and even uterine complaints, if they become aware that such treatment is followed by sterility. It is not at all an uncommon thing for women in all ranks of life, to encourage, and even seek removal of the ovaries in order to escape an increase in the family.

They become acquainted with persons who have submitted to this operation for ovarian disease, and noting nothing but improvement in their health, attended by sterility, their intense anxiety to enjoy immunity from child-bearing makes them eager to submit to operation.

It would be distinctly immoral to sterilize healthy women, who become possessed with the old Roman passion for a childless life, or who simply wish to limit their families for any selfish or personal reason.

Any law which recognizes the induction of artificial sterility should make operative interference with those fit to procreate a healthy stock an offence.

Induced sterility should rank with induced abortion, and be a criminal offence, except in certain cases which could be defined.

There is much evidence to suggest that artificial sterilization may become as a great vice, as great a danger to the State as criminal abortion.

Artificial abortion, as commonly performed, is a much more dangerous operation than tubo-ligature. Of the two operations, any experienced surgeon would readily declare that the latter is the simpler and the safer; the one less likely to lead to unfavourable complications, and the one, moreover, that would leave the subject of it with the better "expectancy of life."

Anæsthetics and antiseptics have made this comparison possible and true.

Any surgeon who performs tubo-ligature should be liable to prosecution, unless he can justify his action according to the law relating to the artificial sterility of the unfit.

While the law would eventually require to be obligatory, with regard to the absolutely unfit, it would require to be permissive in all other cases.

Many voluntarily abstain from marriage, because of a strong hereditary tendency to certain diseases such as cancer and tubercle.

There must of necessity be many on the border-land between the fit and the unfit, and clauses permitting sterilization under some circumstances would be required.