The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

After publishing important works on eugenics and euthanasia, Ian Dowbiggin has tackled yet another controversial issue in this new book exploring the organized movement to promote sterilization. Most of his book focuses on the organization founded in 1937 as the Sterilization League of New Jersey (but currently named Engender Health), which played a leading role in advocating sterilization as a means of contraception. He provides useful vignettes of key leaders and funders of this organization, including its founder Marion Olden, wealthy physician Clarence Gamble, the gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson, Alan Guttmacher, and others. Dowbiggin masterfully provides context for the organization, discussing various fellow-travelers and opponents along the way. He also includes some material on other countries, especially India, but even these discussions generally link back to their impact on or relationship to the United States. In many respects Engender Health (under various names throughout its history) was fabulously successful, since by the last quarter of the twentieth century sterilization became the most widely used form of contraception, both in the U.S. and worldwide. At the dawn of the twentieth century, however, sterilization was generally considered immoral and thus was illegal in all states.

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