A man with Huntington's chorea, if married and if he has children, will surely transmit the disease to some of these children, and they to their children. Vasectomy on him will prevent a propagation of his kind but will cure no disease. Moreover, he is not a criminal and not amenable to punishment. The bad effect, sterilization, must be perpetual in his case or it is foolish, but the sterilization is not a punishment, nor a means of saving the health of the patient. Whatever good comes of the act comes out of an evil cause. If such a man persists in marrying, his marriage might be prevented, but that is different from mutilating him.
The State has no direct dominion over the lives or members of its citizens, nor are citizens naturally mere instruments for the good of the government; on the contrary, the government exists solely for the good and utility of the citizen. The State may not take the life of an innocent person, nor mutilate him, unless these acts are necessary either (1) to protect the life or rights of individuals; or (2) to preserve the social life of the commonwealth. Now, neither of these two requisites is present when there is question of vasectomizing a man.
The right or life of no individual is at stake. The rights of the possible children, yet unborn, are not injured, because, as these children are not in existence, they have no rights. Should they come into being, it is always better to be, even though diseased, than not to be. The methods of cattle-breeders in dealing with human beings is not a virtue in the State, but an outrage and a degradation of human nature.
The rights of the wife are not injured, because she personally receives no injury; and if her possible children have chorea, for example, she either voluntarily took that risk when she married, or if she did not, through ignorance, there are other means to avoid the trouble than the evil of sterilization, which in itself would render the use of marriage onanistic. If the husband has syphilis, gonorrhea, leprosy, tuberculosis, or any other infectious disease, vasectomy is no protection for the wife.
May a physician employed by the State in a prison, an institution for the feeble-minded, or a like place, do vasectomy at the command of the law? Certainly he may not, except in those rare cases where vasectomy is permissible as described above.
The advocates of freakish legislation harp on the assertion that insanity and imbecility are increasing alarmingly, and as a consequence the entire nation is degenerating. To cure this evil we are to mutilate certain criminals and the mentally defective. It is not true that insanity and mental imbecility are increasing in a very marked degree in the United States. The number of inhabitants in this country is increasing rapidly, and as there are more people here than there were a few years ago, the number of the insane and the mentally defective has increased pari passu, but the percentage does not increase to any degree that calls for immoral and ineffective legislation. Only of late years have the State governments begun to classify, diagnose, and gather up the insane and the imbecile, whom we always have had with us, and these processes have brought the defectives into the light.
Our late immigrants are not equal in race, in mental and moral strength, to the old northern European immigrants. In Philadelphia the foreign-born population is 24.7 per cent. of the whole, but that foreign-born population gives us 44 per cent. of the indigent insane. In New York State 27 per cent. of the registered insane are not American citizens. What we need here is not sterilization, but a better control of the immigrant, a keeping out of the unfit. Again, our insanity percentage is increased avoidably by the undoubted increase of insanity among negroes. We are accountable for this because we do not care for our helpless negroes. These people are prevented by trades-unions from learning and working at elevating trades, and they are thus forced unjustly into a poverty and degradation which lead to vice and mental deterioration. The cure is not a jail surgeon's scalpel, evidently.
A system of education that ignores the will, upon which morality and virtue are based, and substitutes a sham intellectuality as elaborated by ignorant boards of education and administered by emotional, half-educated women, together with a lack of genuine religion, is a prolific source of mental and moral deterioration and consequent degeneracy in the physical and moral orders. Our American public-school system is such, and its deity is the unwashed and crassly depraved god Demos, whose bible is the evening newspaper. If we could civilize our schools, we should have no mention of legislation by vagary.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ecclesiastical Review, vols, xlii, xliii, xliv, xlvi, xlvii, xlviii, passim. Philadelphia.
Gemelli. La Scuola Cattolica, November, 1911. Milan.
Stucchi. Ibid.
Eschbach. Ibid., February, 1912; Analecta Ecclesiastica, September and October, 1911.
Capello. La Scuola Cattolica, February, 1912.
Michaud. Nouvelle Revue Théologique. Paris, 1914.
Schmidt. Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie, nn. 1 and 4, 1911.
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De Smet. Collationes Brugenses, December, 1910.
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Waffelaert. De Virtutibus Cardinalibus, vol. ii. Bruges, 1889.
Sharp. Journal of the American Medical Association, December 4, 1909. This is the article which started the entire vasectomy controversy.
Barker. Maryland Medical Journal, April, 1910.
Bell. Hereditary Criminality. Medico-Legal Journal, vol. xvii. New York.
Desfosses. Presse Méd., vol. xviii.
Rentoul. St. Thomas Hospital Gazette, vol. xx. London.
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