The Eugenic Records Office director Harry Laughlin drew up a model eugenics law in 1932. This, together with his and Davenport’s energetic lobbying, eventually persuaded thirty states to pass laws allowing for the compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-minded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed and dependent. By the time such laws were struck down in the early 1970s, some 63,000 people had been forcibly sterilised and many more persuaded to accept voluntary sterility.
