The local Brattleboro newspaper has a new appreciation of Arthur Goodenough. The newspaper doesn’t appear to block visitors from outside the USA.

Their new local history article focuses on Goodenough’s speaking out against the state-enforced sterilisation of 250 “idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane” in Vermont, to prevent them from having children. That was in 1931, and the Great Depression was beginning to grip. To many at that time, it must have seemed quite a sensible move.

But Goodenough rightly worried about what would now be called ‘mission creep’. Worried that, once such a thing was permitted, the public would come to accept it and doctors would treat it as routine. Then the apparently limited policies would slowly grow into a self-serving bureaucracy that could start to encompass anyone deemed ‘aberrant’…

He stated that it is unknown if physical or mental infirmaries might visit the lawmakers later in life; or find their way into the lives of friends, children or grandchildren. With passage of the law any of them could find themselves visited by the sterilization knife as well.