Content note: Pro-sterilisation pamphlet using "insane and feebleminded" for patients, with a disparaging remark about Catholics. This object is shown as it was published. Why
Human Sterilization Today
First page of a 1938 pamphlet from a private California foundation promoting eugenic sterilization. It reports that state institutions had 'sterilized nearly 12,000 insane and feebleminded patients', says the operation 'merely cuts and seals the tubes' and 'is not a mutilation in any sense of the word', and wraps the policy in the name 'Human Betterment' and the language of a medical case study.
- Date
- 1938
- Period
- Interwar
- Made by
- Human Betterment Foundation, Pasadena, California
- Region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Medium
- Books and pamphlets
- Issuer type
- NGO
- Regime
- Roosevelt Administration
- Leader
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Persuade or win support
- Themes
- Health, Science and technology
- Techniques
- Euphemism / doublespeakGlittering generalitiesTransfer
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, retrieved September 27, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (U.S. publication without copyright notice)
Human Betterment Foundation, Pasadena; Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
Text on the object
A publication of the HUMAN BETTERMENT FOUNDATION Pasadena, Calif. HUMAN STERILIZATION TODAY With the Compliments of THE HUMAN BETTERMENT FOUNDATION 321 PACIFIC SOUTHWEST BUILDING PASADENA, CALIFORNIA During the last twenty-eight years, California state institutions have sterilized nearly 12,000 insane and feebleminded patients. The following pages embody results shown by a case-study of the first 10,000 of these sterilizations. This sterilization is a surgical operation, which prevents parenthood without in any way or degree unsexing the patient, or impairing his or her health. It merely cuts and seals the tubes through which the germ cells—the spermatozoa and ova,—must pass. It is wholly different, therefore, from the crude and brutal operations of castration and asexualization, performed for the selfish purposes of the perpetrators. Primitive and pagan peoples castrated boys to produce eunuchs. Roman Catholics continued the practice until modern times, to provide male soprano voices for their cathedral choirs. Unlike these practices, modern sterilization is not a mutilation in any sense of the word. In men, the operation (vasectomy) can be performed under a local anaesthetic in fifteen or twenty minutes, and in light work occasions no loss of time. In women, the operation (salpingectomy) involving the opening of the abdomen, is comparable to an uncomplicated operation for chronic appendicitis, which means a week or two in bed. In either sex, failures are almost unknown. 1
This is page 1 of the pamphlet only (the committed image). The 'With the Compliments of...' lines are a rubber-stamp impression overprinted on the title page, transcribed in the position they appear. Ghosted text from the facing page, bleeding through the paper, is visible in the background of the scan but is not transcribed here since it belongs to a different page.
