After being forcibly sterilized at age 17, Lucille Schreiber exposed a shamefully common practice
She accused doctors of committing ‘sexual murder’
The state officials who sterilized Lucille Schreiber made no effort to hide what they had done. Even after she sued them for a quarter of a million dollars, they blithely admitted to depriving her, and hundreds of other women committed to the state-run mental hospital, of their fundamental procreative rights. It was 1955 and, while the national eugenics movement had long since peaked, it was alive and well in Colorado.
The defendants, four doctors associated with the hospital, did not dispute that Lucille had been sterilized without statutory authority or her consent. They disputed that the operation was illegal and that it had harmed the plaintiff. They believed sterilizing female patients like Lucille benefited both the patient and society, by preventing such “mental deficients” from having children. Lucille believed the doctors were wrong and took them to court to prove it.
Tall, with blond hair and blue eyes, Lucille was sterilized at age 17, more than a decade before her case was filed, while she’d been an involuntary patient at the state hospital. She had been an anxious, sometimes angry child who disobeyed, lied, stole, and ran away from home. At 11, her family left her at a home for delinquent girls. For six years, she bounced from one such home to another, and was eventually evaluated at the Colorado Psychopathic Hospital. Citing “problems of masturbation, truancy and discipline,” she was given a diagnosis of “hysterical reaction in a mentally deficient individual” and shipped to the mental hospital in Pueblo.
Nine months later, on May 13, 1941, a nurse wheeled Lucille into the hospital’s operating room, where her fallopian tubes were removed by the resident surgeon, Dr. Irving Schatz. She was discharged the following month. No psychological improvement was noted, and she was not legally “restored to reason.” It seems there was simply no longer a reason to keep her confined.
Lucille’s operation was not unusual. In fact, it was considered routine. Hospital superintendent Frank Zimmerman, one of the defendants, testified that sterilizing female patients with “suspected mental deficiency,” or those who seemed likely to have illegitimate children, was a minor operation. It was freely performed by staff doctors so long as they had permission from the patient’s next of kin, and Lucille’s parents had signed a consent purportedly authorizing her operation. However, her mother testified that she and Lucille’s father were told they had to sanction the operation in order for Lucille to be released. Zimmerman admitted that it was his policy for staff to make every effort, no matter how conniving, to obtain written permission to sterilize female patients.
Assistant superintendent J.L. Rosenbloom told local reporters that sterilizations had continued at the hospital up to the year Lucille filed suit, stating that there were “about three or four” operations annually. He said sterilizing Lucille “seemed the right thing to do” at the time, but also admitted the “possibility” that a patient like Lucille would recover from her mental illness and, in that case, be harmed by her sterilization. While Dr. Rosenbloom did not say what that harm might be, Lucille did, in her deposition testimony:
Q : How did you arrive at your claim for damages in this case?
A: Well, all the money in the world would not compensate me for the terrible loss I am suffering. …
Q : What loss have you suffered?
A : The loss of the right and the joy and the privilege of bearing children and being a mother.
Decades later, when Lucille was nearly 80, she was more explicit: “What they did to me was sexual murder.”
Lucille’s loss was not just a result of certain doctors performing an illegal operation; it was a direct result of the eugenics movement, an effort, backed by pseudo-science, to improve the human population by eliminating undesirable traits from the gene pool. Eugenics flourished in America in the early part of the 20th century. More than 30 states enacted laws authorizing sterilization of undesirable persons, including those found mentally or morally deficient. (Colorado did not enact a sterilization law, although four bills were put forward between 1913 and 1928.)
The United States Supreme Court decided that Virginia’s eugenics-based sterilization law was constitutional under the 14th Amendment, in Buck v. Bell (1927), a case that has never been expressly overruled. “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. for the majority.
Dr. Zimmerman’s “medical reason” for advocating sterilization of “mental deficients” echoed Justice Holmes’s reasoning. In court, Lucille’s attorney asked, “Is it true that mental deficients will always produce mental deficients?”
“Not necessarily,” said Zimmerman, “but we have three or four generations out at the State Hospital.”
Between 1907 and 1963, at least 60,000 people were sterilized as part of the eugenics movement. This number does not include Lucille and other women who underwent the procedure in states that did not have laws authorizing the practice and therefore didn’t keep an accurate count. Conservatively, the evidence from Lucille’s lawsuit indicates that at least 120 women were victims of Colorado’s secret sterilization practice. Had she not sued, it’s likely that no one would have learned that these crimes were committed.
The illegality of the hospital’s actions was proved at trial by a preponderance of the evidence. The judge’s instructions to the jury essentially stated that the defendants were liable for damages for the operation performed on Lucille. However, the defendants were acquitted, based on the jury’s finding that Lucille had become sane prior to being legally restored to reason and, therefore, had not filed her complaint in a timely manner. But even though Lucille lost her case, her case was not a loss.
Lucille sought to hold her male abusers accountable and gave voice to hundreds of other, previously unknown, women who had been sterilized while patients at the state hospital. One of them may have read about the trial in the newspaper and felt less alone. One of them could be reading about Lucille right now.
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