Imagine first what a [SERIOUS] tag on this sub would mean, and then imagine that this has one.
I intend no flaming, controversy or trolling from this. I want to know more about something that did not occur in a vacuum.
Now, as to the question:
It seems to me that those sterilization laws fell into disfavor rather definitively when their logical end was made manifest in Hitler's Germany. I could be wrong about that, as I haven't done even more homework. But I was surprised to learn today that the origins of ideas about racial purity did not originate with The Nazis, but were a shared pool of the investigations and pronouncements of worldwide academia, and that the US had created what became a model law that the Germans government emulated in 1933.
Is that conversation over, or was it simply put on hold? Did the US and other countries abandon eugenics and sterilization after WWII? If so, was it because of Hitler's pogroms? Was the body of those beliefs held accountable in any way for the development of Nazi policies?
Hi. Eugenics is a big topic, so not discouraging anyone from contributing more on this here, but there have been some threads that talk about the relationship between eugenics movements in the USA and Germany, and subsequent fall out of favour, so check these out for now:
Before the Nazis came about, how popular and commonplace was the Eugenics movement? featuring /u/TheShowIsNotTheShow
Was the American eugenics movement responsible for the holocaust? featuring /u/restricteddata
How did the eugenics-craze of the 1920's and 30's turn into a genocide in Germany?
Eugenics was picking up momentum in the early 20th century in America. What killed it? featuring /u/Dubstripsquads
... and you'll find mention of sterilization of aboriginal peoples in threads on North American genocide, e.g. Does what happened to the Native Americans in North and Meso-America and South America count as Genocide?
The US sterilization program was never "one thing" — it was a state-by-state effort, for state-by-state reasons, with state-by-state idiosyncrasies. The sterilization programs in some states continued well after World War II, while others had already died out before WWII. California, for example, continued until the early 1950s, and the reasons for its demise had really nothing to do with WWII or the Nazis, but had to do with a restructuring of the state mental health system. I have published an article about the case of California here — I find it very useful as a way of thinking about American sterilization, and eugenics, in general, as institutional practices.
In the case of sterilization, it was not associated by most Americans with Nazism's horrors until around the 1970s. This itself is an interesting historical "move," but in general the association of "eugenics" with "Nazis" was a softer one until that time period. You had a lot of association of "racial theory" with the Nazis, of course, but "eugenics" was still seen as something distinct. In the 1970s, with the rise of various "identity politics" movements in the USA, that connection became more cemented.
The normal "answer" to this that you find in some histories of eugenics is that the air went out of the US effort in the 1930s, as a response to the Great Depression. This has some truth to it, but I am personally a bit dubious of this "intellectual history" approach to the matter, which tries to get a grasp on the shifts of ideas. Ideas are hard to track, if we're talking about popular and even elite interest. My article tries to get around this by looking at practices which are much easier to track (though as you will see they still involve a lot of historical digging!).
There are a few examples of scientists in the 1950s deciding to explicitly eschew the term "eugenics." For example, the term "genetic counseling" was coined specifically to avoid eugenic overtones, and avoiding the pitfalls of eugenics (e.g., focusing on populations rather than individuals, being normative if not coercive) was baked into the origins of the discipline. It is not clear that this was as a response to the Nazis, per se; "eugenics" within the scientific community had started to be associated primarily with cranks by the 1930s, and something distinct from the study of human genetics.
My favorite short read on this is Diane Paul's Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (1995). Paul does a very good job of sticking to the facts and not drawing connections unless there is evidence they should be drawn. This is a major problem with most other works in this literature: in the name of sensationalism and scandal ("the US was complicit in the Holocaust"), and overly-simplistic stories (e.g. "we learned our lessons from the Nazis"), most books tend to tell a story they want to tell. Paul puts everything out there but remains very careful about making historical connections. My own article attempts to be in the vein as well (it is about the difficulty of establishing specifically ideological causes of abhorrent practices).