The Uses and Limitations of Sterilization in Social Psychiatry

The uses and limitations of sterilization in psychiatry have become questions of considerable sociological importance since the publication of the Brock Report in January 1934. Compulsory and voluntary sterilization have quite different social implications—Psychiatric implications of the German law and of laws which have been proposed or passed in the U.S.A. Proposals of the Brock Committee; psychiatric aspects of the safeguards proposed; necessity for some general safeguards to prevent abuses. Genetic results attainable by a vigorously applied compulsory measure as against those to be expected from a voluntary measure.