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1. 1 2025-10-01T19:37:25+00:00 John Bell 95368f97d82dceffed8038b36e9c51da6c29afe3 Iowa's Eugenic Act Transcript John Bell 1 plain 2025-10-01T19:37:25+00:00 John Bell 95368f97d82dceffed8038b36e9c51da6c29afe3

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• 1 2025-10-01T19:37:18+00:00 Iowa's Sterilization Laws 10 plain 2026-08-19T11:30:30+00:00 In 1911, the Iowa legislature passed their first sterilization law to “prevent the procreation of habitual criminals, idiots, feeble-minded, and imbeciles.”[1] This initial act targeted patients and inmates at public institutions, and encouraged public officials to examine these individuals and judge if they should be allowed to have children. This measure, as reasoned by the General Assembly, was to prevent these “inferior” individuals from passing down their perceived flaws, including any hereditary tendency toward “disease, crime, insanity, feeble-mindedness, idiocy or imbecility.”[2]
  
  The law itself changed multiple times over the next few years to both strengthen the state’s power to enforce this legislation and further define under what conditions an individual could be considered for sterilization. By 1915, a superintendent of any state mental hospital could approve patient sterilization and in 1917, the state granted further permissions to approve the sterilization of people incarcerated in state institutions.  
  
  How did the state decide who fit into these categories? In 1929, general assembly members approved another law to create the State Board of Eugenics, consisting solely of the medical director of the state mental hospital in Iowa City and superintendents of other state hospitals. These medical professionals recommended inmates and Iowa residents for sterilization if a medical professional classified them as feebleminded, insane, syphilitic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, or sexual perverts. At first glance, it seemed that this change further restricted and refined improper or unneeded sterilizations, but ultimately it placed great power in a small group of medical superintendents to define inferiority and categorize “unfit” individuals.
  
  One newspaper article about the new legislation remarked that the state reviewed this measure to grant the Eugenics Board its new power, which they approved. There were ten members of the Eugenics Board when it began in 1929. These measures to control individual reproduction coincided with the larger eugenics movement in the United States, and were part of broader discussions about American economic and political endeavors. In one conference to discuss the U.S. employment rate in 1928, Iowa Governor John Hammill advocated for sterilization. He promoted this practice both as a way to improve economic conditions and promote American prosperity worldwide. As Hammill argued, it was his “‘balanced opinion that we must resort to sterilization to prevent the feeble-minded and those tainted by chronic disease from filling our institutions with their offspring.’”[3] This kind of rhetoric justified the coercive or forced sterilization of many in Iowa and across the nation.
   

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  [1] Chapter 66, “Eugenics,” Laws of the Thirty-Fourth General Assembly of the State of Iowa, 1911.

  [2] “Eugenics,” Laws of the Thirty-Fourth General Assembly, 1911.

  [3] “Hoover Labor Plan Declined by Governors: State Executives Refuse to Endorse Proposed Three Billion Emergency Employment Fund,” Atlanta Constitution, 22 November 1928.