The US has been there done that, and you can read all about it in this entirely secular book: Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity By Harry Bruinius (Vintage, 2007).
Thought I had a review for you, but I can’t seem to find it. But this blurb from a New Yorker review gives you the gist:
In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of sterilizing a twenty-one-year-old woman thought to be “feebleminded,” and Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority, “It is better for all the world, if . . . society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” This precedent led to the escalation of eugenics in the United States, and the coercive sterilization of more than sixty-five thousand people (many of whom were poor women). Bruinius deftly combines analysis of how the American quest for moral and social purity prepared people to accept pseudo-science as a basis for national policy with an account of the personal and intellectual development of eugenics’ most influential American advocates . . .
Highly recommend. Really: Forced sterilization is a super bad idea.
….it happened here on the left coast quite a bit (surprise!); there are people still alive who were told they wouldn’t get out of reform school, unless they were sterilized. Sick.
Yes. Sick. If I recall correctly, the book looks in detail at institutions and cases in Virginia. Racism was a major motivator.
Not even the Left proposes forced sterilization anymore. Why bother: easy abortion achieves the same eugenic goals under the aegis of Personal Freedom.
You don’t hear about, but it happens. These days the target is the disabled, and the perpetrators are caregivers who don’t want to hassle with the associated difficulties.