Many people are surprised to learn that in the 20th century over 60,000 people in the United States, mainly patients in state asylums and hospitals, were sterilized based on eugenics laws. Eugenics, the effort to shape and limit populations through sterilization and other forms of reproductive control, was popularized and institutionalized in 20th century America. While all of these laws have been repealed in the United States, for many years they permitted doctors and state officials to decide that certain people were not "fit" enough to be able to control their own reproductive lives.

While these decisions were legal in some states, they were also based on highly subjective criteria that had nothing to do with someone's reproductive health, including but not limited to issues of poverty, infectious diseases like tuberculosis, and a lack of access to education. Further, these laws assumed that people with neurological conditions, like epilepsy, or cognitive delays and differences shouldn't have the same kind of control over their own bodies as other Americans. While excellent scholarly books, articles, and web resources on the history of eugenics and sterilization have appeared in recent years, knowledge about this history is often limited to academic circles.

The people who were sterilized, sometimes against their direct wishes and more often without accurate information about how it might impact them, are very rarely heard from in both historical accounts and popular conversations. Many of these same people have since died, often without family or friends knowing about their experiences of physical and psychological abuse. Widespread public awareness of the realities of eugenic practices and their impacts have been similarly limited, with a few notable exceptions.

While patient privacy is important, an unfortunate reality is that privacy laws have been cited as justification for restricting scholars' access to the few records of eugenic sterilizations that remain. According to Health and Human Services guidance the federal law “explicitly excludes from the definition of ‘protected health information’ individually identifiable health information regarding a person who has been deceased for more than 50 years." For medical records that are over 50 years old, researchers and historians are allowed access by federal law, which ideally enables  historical research while balancing privacy considerations. States, however, are empowered to enact more stringent laws, leading to a patchwork of regulations for anyone wanting to understand historical medical and ethical practices and some state agencies have relied on a now defunct pre-1996 rule to limit access to records indefinitely.

While eugenics laws have largely been struck down and/or removed in the United States, the legacies of these practices have shaped communities and relationships between communities throughout the country. Further, people in the US and beyond are hearing more from people who would like to bring eugenic practices back.
 

What is a “Contextual Archive”?

We’ve created this collection so that our readers can learn more about the history of American eugenics. We also want to provide people with  images, publications, and letters to provide a greater sense of the contexts in which eugenic ideas flourished. Through data storytelling, we show how a small group of people used their power and influence to shape the lives of thousands. 

An archive is traditionally defined as a “place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept.” You might picture old dusty files and vast boxes of materials and you’d be partly right. What we’ve gathered together here in this collection is a selection of materials from a variety of sources. Some were found in old filing cabinets, some in official state archives, others are publicly available or were published as pamphlets and in newspapers. We’ve created digital versions that maintain people’s privacy, while also giving you a sense of the kinds of forms, information, and images created during this era.

Our data storytelling, on the other hand, uses the full set of materials that we as researchers have available to us (other materials are missing or destroyed, unknown to us, or we aren’t permitted to see them). Working in collaboration with our colleagues in the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, including the many students and researchers who entered vast amounts of data, we are able to offer you a sense of the scope and scale of sterilizations and how they differed across states and time periods.

Navigating the site:

1. Courts and the Law
2. Disability, Medicine, and Expertise
3. Families
4. Race and Immigration
5. Sexuality, Reproduction, and the Body
6. The State and Institutions

The second path Implementing Eugenics in California, Iowa, and North Carolina, is place-based and helps to highlight the different ways that states implemented eugenic ideas and embedded them in government and institutional structures. You can access both paths through hyperlinks, in the menus at the top left or in the visual links down below. 

Embedded media can be viewed in the page where they are located by scrolling in the smaller window, or can be clicked on to view in full frame.

At the top-left of the Scalar header, you’ll find a series of icons. Rolling over the menu/contents icon  will reveal links to the two major paths, as well a gallery of data visualizations and our acknowledgements page.

You can also explore the embedded sections of each path by hovering over the  chevron within the menu. At the top of the menu section is the “Home”  button, which you can use at any time to return to the start of the collection.

At the bottom of the menu section you'll find the index icon, located just below the main table of contents. The index contains a hyperlinked catalog of all content in the current book.