It is very important that marriages with registered persons should be made illegal, and, as a corollary to this, that it should be made an indictable offence for any person knowingly to have carnal knowledge of a registered person. It should also be provided that any parent or guardian who facilitates or negligently allows any registered person to have carnal intercourse with another person shall be guilty of an indictable offence.
SECTION 10.--THE QUESTION OF STERILIZATION.
A question which has given the Committee much anxious thought is as to whether sterilization should be adopted as a method of preventing the propagation of the feeble-minded. That it would be an effective method as regards the persons operated on goes without saying. The operation of vasectomy in the case of males is a very simple one, which may be performed with the aid of a local anæsthetic, and may be said for all practical purposes to be unattended by any risk to the patient. In the case of women a similar operation on the Fallopian tubes, which is known as salpingectomy, is an abdominal operation and cannot be said to be entirely free from danger, although it is not regarded as very serious. Except for the prevention of fertility, the operation does not interfere with the sexual powers of the patient and has little or no effect on sexual desires. It has been stated that a process of sterilization by means of X-rays can be applied to either sex. The only evidence available, however, shows that this method is still in the experimental stage, and the Committee, for this reason, cannot recommend it, especially as there is a danger that it might damage the cells producing the internal secretions which influence the secondary sexual characteristics and so injuriously affect the general health and mentality.
Several States in America have passed laws providing for the sterilization of persons in State institutions who are--(1) Insane, (2) feeble-minded, (3) criminalistic.
In some of the States an appeal was made to the Supreme Court, and, the law being pronounced unconstitutional, no attempt was made to enforce it. In other States the law has been allowed to become a dead-letter. Up to the 1st January, 1921, the latest date dealt with by the most recently published work on the subject, there have been 124 State institutions legally authorized to perform operations for sterilization, of which thirty-one have made more or less use of their authority, while ninety-three have not. The total number of operations performed up to the date mentioned was 3,233, divided into classes as follows: Feeble-minded, 403; insane, 2,700; criminalistic, 130. Of this total of 3,233 operations the State of California contributed no less than 2,538, and in this State a single institution (the State Hospital for the Insane at Patton) is responsible for no fewer than 1,009 cases. A Bill introduced in 1924 into the Senate to legalize sterilization of mental defectives, &c., was rejected.