Abstract

Laughlin's conclusions stressed a broad program of education, segregation, marriage prohibition, and selective sterilization that would "largely but not entirely eliminate from the race the source of supply of the great anti-social human varieties" within two generations. First, there should be early identification and commitment of the socially inadequate in order to segregate them and prevent their reproduction. All institutionalized persons supported by public funds were to be examined and their family backgrounds investigated. Those "found to be potential parents with undesirable hereditary potentialies and not likely to be governed by the highest moral purpose" would be sterilized. Laughlin calculated that his institutional sterilization program would eventually require approximately 150 operations per year for every 100,000 people in the general population.