ABSTRACT
Having surveyed the international history of non-consensual sterilisation, it transpires that the American history of compulsory sterilisation is not something that any modern American court would be particularly proud of, especially of Holmes J’s somewhat blunt statements in Buck v Bell, which appear to reflect the eugenic overtones of the early law. However, of far more culpability, carried out with explicit eugenic content, and with ‘ethnic cleansing’ in mind is the Nazi programme of compulsory sterilisation in Germany, which still forms a rather large blot on this particular landscape. However, there has been a radical transformation of sterilisation laws in the USA in the 1980s, and a new Carership Law in the new unified Germany in the 1990s.
