Oregon Eugenics: Sixty Years of Authorized Sterilization

In nineteen seventeen, Oregon passed a law authorizing the compulsory sterilization of people the state classified as unfit. The categories were broad: people with mental illness, developmental disabilities, epilepsy, and other conditions the legislature deemed heritable defects. The law remained on the books in one form or another until nineteen eighty-three.

Sixty-six years. That is the span of Oregon's authorized eugenics program.

The documented count from state records, the figure Governor John Kitzhaber cited when he issued a formal apology in two thousand two, is approximately two thousand six hundred forty-eight individuals sterilized under Oregon law. Historians and researchers have noted that this figure represents the documented count from surviving records, and that the actual total may be higher if records were lost or incompletely maintained during the program's earlier decades.

The people who were sterilized were disproportionately drawn from the same populations that ended up in state institutions: poor Oregonians, people with limited family resources who could not arrange alternatives, individuals held in facilities like the Multnomah County Poor Farm and the Oregon State Hospital. The program intersected with the same institutional logic that confined people to those facilities in the first place.

Kitzhaber's apology in two thousand two described the program as a profound and tragic wrong. Oregon was not unusual in having a eugenics program; more than thirty states had similar legislation by the nineteen thirties. Oregon was unusual in keeping its law active through nineteen eighty-three, decades after most other states had abandoned theirs and after the Nuremberg trials had placed Nazi Germany's eugenics program before an international tribunal.

The Oregon Historical Society holds documentary records from the program. They are available to researchers.