Handbook for speakers / issued by the Joint Committee on Voluntary Sterilization.

Date:
[1934?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Handbook for speakers / issued by the Joint Committee on Voluntary Sterilization. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/40 (page 10)
    attached (The Law as to Sterilization, by Mr. Cecil Binney). Briefly the situation is as follows:—Sterilization, when conducted with a view to benefiting the health of a man or a woman, is unquestionably legal. Such sterilizations are described as thera¬ peutic. Thus there is no legal obstacle to sterilizing a woman who suffers from heart or kidney disease, from tuberculosis, diabetes or, indeed, from any of those conditions which doctors recognise as making pregnancy dangerous. Such therapeutic sterilizations are much more frequently performed upon women than men. The male sex is afflicted by few diseases whose severity can be mitigated by vasectomy, but the same effects as those of vasectomy are often brought about in operations commonly performed upon men. Thus it is a common affliction of advancing age that the prostate gland enlarges and requires to be removed. Sterility usually follows. This argument can sometimes be used with effect in order to remove the prevalent belief that sterilization is a drastic operation changing the individual's nature down to its roots. The legality of sterilization only comes into question when it is performed, not in order to benefit the health of the individual, but with the eugenic aim of preventing hereditarily disease or defective children being born. The position of the law in regard to the sterilizations performed on therapeutic and eugenic grounds must be carefully distinguished. There is a general consensus of opinion that the sterilization of a mental defective or of an insane person would be illegal (an opinion on this subject was given in 1925 by Sir Travers Hum¬ phreys in response to a request from the British Association. This opinion is printed in the supplement of the British Medical Journal, June, 1925, page 286). It is not necessary that speakers should acquaint themselves with the various reasons for regarding such sterilizations as illegal, since the general principle is univer¬ sally conceded and questions about it are rarely asked. Perhaps the most cogent reason is that such an operation would be held to contravene Section 55 of the Mental Deficiency Act which imposes upon persons in charge of mental defectives the duty of not ill- treating them. An operation conducted for ulterior racial reasons, without reference to the personal welfare of the defective, might be construed as ill-treatment. The above remarks apply to mental defectives. The Brock Committee recommend sterilization for persons who have suffered from mental disorder (note the past tense). This means that it would not be applicable to persons while they were insane but only when they had recovered from insanity. Persons falling under this category can therefore be treated as compos mentis, as can the persons falling under groups (i) b and с on page 57 of the Brock Report. The Law as to voluntary sterilization of a person who is compos mentis is uncertain. Particulars will be found in Mr. IO