Note S — IV.—COMPULSORY TREATMENT.

Towards the end of last year, extraordinary interest was aroused throughout the United States by a decision of Judge Royal Graham, of the Children's Court of Denver. He had ordered Mrs. Clyde Cassidente to submit to an operation to make further motherhood impossible, because of the under-nourishment of her five children and the habitual insanitary condition of her home. This was the first time any American court had imposed such conditions. Judge Graham could not legally compel the mother to agree to the operation, but he told her that if she refused he would commit all her children to a home. She then agreed. Judge Graham was much influenced by the testimony of Dr. Sunderland, who described the progressive insanitary environment as more children came, and declared that in his opinion the home condition was not due to poverty but to too frequent child-bearing.

In the February, 1922, issue of The Birth Control Review (New York) edited by Mrs. Margaret Sanger, the Medical Officer of a London Welfare Centre (Dr. Norman Haire, M.B., Ch.M.) definitely advocates contraception and sterilisation as a result of his experiences in a very poor part of London. Medical officers of many welfare centres now hold similar views. In The New Generation, the official organ of the Malthusian League, Dr. Barbara Crawford, M.B.E., M.B., Ch.B., strongly urges birth-control, and says:—

"I would go further and say that all those with incurable transmissible disease, all addicted to drugs or alcohol in excess, those habitually criminal or vicious, and the mentally defective, should be rendered sterile by operation, for such as these cannot or will not use control, and their children tend to inherit their parents' taint and to lead maimed and vicious lives."—Vol. I, No. 4, p. 3. The New Generation.—E.A.R.