In my biennial report to the present Legislature, after mentioning the basic importance of institutional development and facilities for the training of mentally handicapped children, I emphasized the following extra‐institutional methods as important features in any adequate State‐wide program having for its object the rational control of mental deficiency.

As the subject of sterilization is before the Legislature, I should be pleased to have my position relative to this matter generally understood and ask that you kindly publish this communication.

The question is of sufficient importance to require that conclusions for or against the measure should be formed only after careful, studious inquiry into its merits. Opinion should also not be based, upon prejudice. I quote as follows from my biennial report, and I feel that my opinions have been reached without bias after careful study and rather intimate contact with the problem extending over a period of thirteen years during which time I have become impressed more and more with the need of such a measure to supplement and support the work which institutions like ours are trying to accomplish.

Again I would urge the Legislature to carefully and impartially, consider the subject of sterilization as a part of a state‐wide program. In doing so, this measure is not recommended as a panacea, or as any substitute for other methods generally accepted and heretofore mentioned. We should not delude ourselves regarding this point. It has limited rather than general or wholesale application, and of course must be properly safe‐guarded. It can never supplant the service that must be rendered through the institutions, public, schools and community supervision. But it can supplement and augment the work of all of these, especially when they fail to function eugenically and socially. The results achieved in states where sterilization laws are administered bear witness to this conclusion. Therefore it is recommended especially for the following reasons:

(1) As supplementary to the work of an institution, enabling the safe discharge of many inoffensive adults, as well as many individuals socially adequate except from the eugenic standpoint, as they would be inadequate parents for which latter reason alone are they being held at public expense and to their own detriment. There comes a time when the institution ceases to be of service to such individuals and they occupy the beds that should be used for younger and more trainable subjects. Such legislation should aid greatly in administering the institution as a training school according to the original creating act and prevent it from becoming an "asylum" or "home" for custodial subjects. It is another "tool" to be utilized. (2) It would justify the marriage of many individuals suitable for it, if they could be prevented from having children. Marriage in many such cases serves as stabilizing agent and brings about a satisfactory adjustment, but if capable of bearing children it has to be discouraged or denied and unnatural standards must thereby be imposed‐‐standards which. they cannot, in the natural order of things, respect. (3) Many mentally defective individuals are unsuited for parenthood for other reasons than for those strictly eugenic. They do not make adequate parents, and their own sub‐normality creates a social stigma for the child.

Such legislation would be applicable to conspicuously subnormal married women who are giving birth to defective children. Such children in certain instances are committed to an institution but the mother is left in the home to rear others. Many times this is her only social misdemeanor and could she be deprived of ability for parenthood she might well continue as a wife and home keeper.

The first sterilization law was passed in 1907. From then until 1926, 23 states had passed such laws. The constitutionality of such legislation was established by the United States Supreme Court of 1927 by, an opinion on the Virginia statute given by Justice Holmes, in part as follows: "We have seen more than once that public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover the cutting of the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough."