Compulsory sterilization

Compulsory sterilization is the coerced or legally mandated prevention of a person's ability to reproduce. Governments have imposed it under eugenic, public-health, and social-control policies.

Eugenics: A movement seeking to alter the hereditary composition of populations through selective reproduction. Eugenic claims supplied a major rationale for sterilizing people labeled undesirable.
Sterilization law: Legislation regulating procedures that permanently prevent a person from reproducing. Such laws could authorize sterilization without meaningful consent.
Sterilization in Nazi Germany: The forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of people under Nazi racial-hygiene laws. It demonstrates the scale of state coercion under a eugenic regime.
Reproductive justice: A framework linking reproductive autonomy to social, economic, and political conditions. It addresses both forced sterilization and the conditions that limit reproductive choice.
Voluntary sterilization: A sterilization procedure chosen freely by a person who can give informed consent. Voluntariness separates chosen reproductive care from compulsory sterilization.
Buck v. Bell: A 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld Virginia's compulsory sterilization law. The ruling gave constitutional approval to a prominent American sterilization program.
Institutionalization: The placement of a person in a residential institution under legal or administrative authority. Institutions made targeted populations accessible to state-directed sterilization programs.
Sterilization in the United States: State and federal sterilization practices imposed on people in the United States, especially during the twentieth century. American programs show how compulsory sterilization persisted across jurisdictions and decades.
Bodily integrity: The right to make decisions about one's own body without coercive interference. Compulsory sterilization is a direct violation of bodily integrity.
Forced abortion: The termination of a pregnancy imposed without the pregnant person's consent. It is a distinct form of reproductive coercion that removes control over pregnancy.

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