Saving Babies and Sterilizing Mothers: Eugenics and Welfare Politics in the Interwar United States

This article compares government-funded maternal and child health services with compulsory sterilization, two “eugenic” policies that rationalized reproduction in the United States from the 1910s to the 1930s. As Progressive Era reforms (though they did not achieve their biggest legislative successes until after the First World War), both were based on the optimistic belief that society could be improved through science and “expert” intervention. Yet they rested on very different ideas about the state's responsibility for social welfare. A comparison of the “baby-saving” and sterilization movements highlights the welfare, as opposed to racial (or even eugenic), function of compulsory sterilization in the United States. The association between sterilization and reducing welfare costs was undoubtedly one reason that sterilization programs achieved more lasting success in the United States than government-funded public health services.