WHEN PROGRESSIVES STRIKE:

From the early decades of the 20th century until 1974, 32 states in the union mandated the sterilization of more than 65,000 citizens. At the behest of government eugenics boards, girls and women had their tubes tied or uteri removed, and boys and men their vasa deferentia snipped because they had been deemed unfit to reproduce. Still others came under the scalpel of private doctors, and this second group makes the calculations difficult--65,000 represents only the number of sterilizations where there was municipal paperwork. [...]

By the late '60s--after the Civil Rights Act--eugenics boards became yet more aggressive in trying to engineer blacks out of the voting pool. Gregory Michael Dorr, contributing a chapter to A Century of Eugenics in America, characterizes the period:

Support for implicitly and explicitly eugenic population controls emerged from the concern that the nation faced a demographic explosion among the underclass, a "population bomb" that threatened to destroy civilization in either a hail of welfare claims or violent social revolution. 

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