bs and develop and maintain relationships and live independently if they have access to education and the community. Early in the twentieth century the plight of the metal retarded was ignored or dealt with primarily in state institutions. In addition authorities regarded mentally retarded women as being sexually promiscuous and as producing many illegitimate children (Farber 29). Because of this belief many retarded women would be placed in state institutions at the onset of puberty and sometimes released when they reached menopause. Many people have advocated sterilization for the retarded. Nobel Prize winning physicist William Schockley is quoted saying that he advocated sterilization for people with low IQs and supported a sperm bank for geniuses. A letter from Ben wood, a father of IQ testing stated his beliefs at the education testing service in 1972 when he said: It may be said in all soberness that professional reliefers and most other indigents who produce children thereby commit crimes against humanity which are fully as serious as many acts now considered felonies. They have no moral right to produce such children and therefore should have no legal right to immunity from punishment that constructively fits the crime, such as some form of painless sterilization of both guilty parents, which would be permanent. Before 1930 there were numerous elite groups interested in the problems of the mentally retarded. Some of them were connected with eugenics and sterilization. However, in the early 1900’s several states had already passed laws permitting the sterilization of the mentally retarded. These laws were enacted in the belief that 90% of feeblemindedness was familial in origin (Baumeister 32). Actions have been taken to reverse these laws in recent years mostly because of the backlash of the mentally retarded that have been unknowingly sterilized, and because of human rights advocate’s. In the Supreme Court c...
