Called a “Mississippi Appendectomy” in some southern states and “la operacion” in Puerto Rico, coerced sterilization continued across America following World War II. Even after international condemnation of Nazi eugenic abuses, state Eugenics Boards continued sterilizing patients into the 1970s, particularly women. At the same time, eugenics organizations such as the Pioneer Fund financed new research in the service of white supremacy. This thesis contends that eugenic ideology never died. Instead advocates simply rearticulated eugenic terminology to sustain hierarchical conversations about the relative value of human reproduction in increasingly public spaces. Linguistic shifts in the eugenics movement coincided with the development of the medical economy, rising resistance to the Civil Rights Movement and the eventual dissolution of state eugenics boards. At every stage, discourse that successfully reframed eugenic rhetoric about human difference as fiscal or social conservativism allowed eugenicists to reconstitute themselves in factions of the conservative movement.

