Medicine: Furor About Sterilization

The patient, a former salesgirl in a Baltimore five-and-dime store, married young and had two children. But after each birth she had a nervous breakdown. Estranged from her husband, she had three more children illegitimately, and each time suffered what psychiatrists call a “schizophrenic reaction, catatonic type.” Still only 25, she is now at Maryland’s Springfield State Hospital. Her brothers and sisters and her husband agreed that for her own good she should be sterilized. In a lucid interval she agreed.

Most states have laws specifically authorizing sterilization when it is dictated by medical necessity (28 go further and allow it for eugenic reasons), and none forbids it. But Maryland has no clear-cut legislation on the subject. Circuit Judge Herman Moser went back to a general provision of the Maryland code for his authority: “The court shall have full power … to superintend and direct the affairs of persons non compotes mentis, both as to the care of their persons and the management of their estates.” Last month Judge Moser ordered the operation.

The full weight of Baltimore’s powerful Roman Catholic hierarchy was brought to bear against the order. (The patient is not a Catholic, but a member of the Church of the Brethren.) The order “creates a terrifying precedent,” complained the archdiocese’s official Catholic Review. “An invitation to practice fraud and deceit,” charged an anonymous group of Catholic lawyers. Theologian Francis J. Connell of the Catholic University of America denounced the order as “totalitarian, un-American and irreligious.” Citing Pius XI (“Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects . . . where no crime has taken place”), Connell argued that the judge’s decision was “opposed to the principle that God is the supreme and direct Lord of every human being . . . What civilized person would recommend that … a surgeon cut off the hands of the irresponsible kleptomaniac so that he may no longer steal?”

Last week Judge Moser threw out a petition by Catholic attorneys to stay the order, ruled: “[The court] has not only the authority but a definite obligation to this incompetent to authorize the operation.”