Living in Wisconsin can be a real chore sometimes. We have the third-highest taxes in the country, a parentally-minded state government and cold, long winters. Yet, on two separate occasions in the past decade, Wisconsin has gone out on a limb in implementing important social reforms, living up to the state motto: “Forward.”
Last Friday, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that a man could be ordered, as a condition of his parole, to not have children until he paid his owed child support. This case sets a very important precedent: that people who can not afford to care for the children they have will not be allowed, if they are also in the criminal justice system, to create any more uncared-for children.
The idea of the state interfering in the reproductive rights of citizens should immediately raise red flags for all of us; our country has not always been admirable when it has done so. At its peak, it was legal in 35 states for the government to sterilize variously criminals, the “feebleminded” and other “mental defectives.” The goals of the old American Eugenics movement — to improve public health and reduce poverty and criminal behavior — were the same as those of the current welfare state. Unfortunately, such a system also had the problems of subjectivity in determining who were good candidates for the procedure. Permanence was also an issue; once the procedure was complete there was no undoing it.
The biggest stumbling block to Eugenics was that it became associated with Nazi Germany and all its attendant horrors. Twisting the ideals of creating a healthier, more peaceful populace to their nationalist, socialist vision of a racially pure country led to the Holocaust. In Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, similar Eugenics programs were carried out in the form of quick and brutal ethic cleansing.
While it is correct to recoil at the horrors perpetrated by some acting in the name of Eugenics, it would be facetious to say we do not practice Eugenics in America today or to claim that all Eugenics policies are evil. There are statutes preventing marriage (and procreation) between close relatives and some rather horrible laws prohibiting homosexuals from adopting children.
The nature of punishment is to deny a person rights because they have violated the rights of others. Commonly, we deny thieves (including those guilty of fraud), murderers and a host of other criminals most of their rights by locking them up for a set period of time. Sometimes we take away property rights of the convicted by fining them or having them compensate their victims.
In this case, a man who often violated the rights of others and who refused to take responsibility as a father for his nine children was ordered to not have children because, in part, he has not paid for the kids he already has. While either of these conditions should be sufficient for the order, the commonsense yet taboo stipulation in this case made international headlines.
It is time that we, as members of a relatively enlightened society, sit down and debate the merits of Eugenics in a scientifically advanced country like our own.
I suggest murderers, rapists and other sexual predators should, as a punishment for and as a preventative measure against future violence, be sterilized before their release back into the population. It also seems likely that some scientists with a modest budget could come up with a way (àla “A Clockwork Orange”) to render violent criminals harmless without incarceration, if only for a set period of time. We had over 1.9 million inmates in jails and prison in 2000 and another 4.5 million individuals on probation and parole, with these individuals’ problems costing the nation over $135 billion per year.
We do not want violent criminals acting as parents to malleable children. Yes, we would be taking away these peoples’ rights; such is the nature of punishment. We already deny felons the right to vote as well as the right to own firearms because they have shown themselves to be incapable of living in a free, peaceful society; prohibiting violent criminals from reproducing is logical as well.