Prof. Ladd-Taylor’s “Fixing the Poor” is centered on the activities of the U.S. states and counties, particularly those of the state of Minnesota, in which enforced sterilization laws were in place for both eugenic as well as penal purposes. Through this, the reader is presented with the remarkable scale of these laws, their variation across the states, and the span of time over which they were in force (those of my own home state of Oregon were in place until 1983).
