“The most feasible method of controlling women at present in this state is custodial supervision in an institution. Surgery offers an effectual preventative to conception, but it is not without some danger to life. With the male, however, there is a measure which is safe, practically painless, effective and free from any objections. Vasectomy … has been done a good many times with most satisfactory results to all concerned…. Your Commission is doubtless familiar with the admirable work which has been and is now being done by Dr. H. H. Goddard at Vineland, New Jersey…. Having spent a day there last year I became much interested in the results of his labors. They seemed to furnish undeniable evidence of the folly of allowing defectives to procreate. A large proportion of them are of no comfort or use to themselves or to society in general and moreover very many of them, as you well know, become public charges, for the support of whom you and I and everybody else who pays taxes have to foot the bills. This is all wrong and any experiment which is reasonable and practicable is worthy of trial.”]]> ]]> In a 1910 letter to George W. Gay, Dr. William Henry Carmalt of New Haven stated, “Unless such a law is in the hands of those willing to accept the responsibilities of their positions, it becomes a dead letter. I hope the next Legislature can be induced to put the carrying out of the law in more earnest hands. The real trouble, however, with the whole matter is the absence of statistics in the genealogical histories of inmates, principally of insane asylums and almshouses, for it [is] from them rather than the prisons that the degenerates breed.”

]]> Boston medical and surgical journal a few weeks later.]]>