Esau Walton was not surgically sterilized in 1929 because he had already been institutionally sterilized at the Utah State Prison. Utah — along with 32 other white-male-dominated states — participated in what was known as the eugenics sterilization program from about 1925 to 1960.
These states deemed some groups of people imperfect — namely blacks, imbeciles, prostitutes and low class or any other “undesirable breeders.” These groups were forced to be permanently sterilized to prevent procreation.
Skip ahead to 2013 and one can find the descendants of past lawmakers and church leaders who approved and condoned human sterilization still in Utah and America writ large. They are the same people now fighting tooth and nail against abortion and birth control and women’s rights in general.
Are these separate movements born out of environmental and legal changes or sinister ancestral cultures that share more in common than meets the eye?
Politically, it seems a rebirth of ethics blanketed the previous moral abhorrence of sterilization. In fact, it is just another way to control and repress women, demonize the LGBT population and criminalize minorities and the poor.
What’s more, coercive reproductive practices are still very much alive in the United States. They now appear in the form of anti-abortion sentiments.
What used to be sterilization as a means to procure the “master race” is forcing pregnancies to full term, regardless of the safety or condition of the mother. These are, after all, babies that can easily be taken from the state-controlled uterus and planted in good Christian homes.
It’s also a practice perpetrated against LGBT individuals.
Walton, a black male, had stolen clothing and blankets for his family. He was arrested and labeled a hardened criminal and imprisoned. While serving his sentence, he was violently raped by a fellow white inmate. Then-prison warden, R.E. Davis, determined Walton was gay because of the incident and filed for Walton to be surgically sterilized so as to not pass on any of those so-called “bad genes.”
In Davis v. Walton (1929), the Utah Supreme Court spared Walton. However, it was a safe conservative judgment because Walton obviously could not procreate while incarcerated. The ruling, moreover, kept the white inmate unnamed.
However, the ruling did not spare three female cousins of Walton, who were sent to the Utah State Hospital to be sterilized.
The majority of the hundreds, if not thousands, forced sterilization victims in Utah were female. Eugenics solved the “supreme race” moral dilemma, as it was called, in dealing with the idea of offspring conceived by an unfavored population.
Utah buried its crimes and its perpetuation of sterilization, yet the same sentiments that drove that movement drive the anti-women’s rights and anti-LGBT movement today.
As a young teen, I remember my mom talking about the political fight waged by the Utah Legislature against letting the “retarded” kids out of the Utah State Hospital and into public schools.
Institutional sterilization was the more acceptable practice among Utah families. It was also the practice that could more easily be swept under the rug.
Women and racial and social minorities are oppressed and discounted in Utah. They always have been.
Eugenics and anti-abortion sentiments are two sides of the same coin. Both were born from the same white, patriarchal dominance, a set of privileges unwilling to make proper adjustments to fit the social fabric of America.