How One Woman’s Forced Sterilization Led To A Mayhem Charge and Exposed A Secret World of Medical Atrocities

In January 1936, twenty-one-year-old Ann Cooper Hewitt, the well-known San Francisco heiress, called a press conference alongside her attorney and announced that she was suing her mother, Maryon Cooper Hewitt. Ann claimed that she had been secretly sterilized at the behest of her mother, who paid two doctors to perform the procedure in order to prevent her from claiming an inheritance under her father’s estate. The allegations were explosive news and immediately caught the attention of San Francisco District Attorney, Matthew Brady. (Excerpted from The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt by Audrey Clare Farley.)

This looks like an interesting book. And here is a quote from this article by the same author. It was difficult to choose only one quote…good stuff.

Shortly after Ann’s press conference in San Francisco, the district attorney got wind of her case. At first, Matthew Brady’s eyes widened as he read the girl’s accusations in the San Francisco Examiner. Then his mind began to turn. Here was an opportunity to charge four individuals (Mrs. Cooper Hewitt, the doctor who ordered the operation, the doctor who performed it, and the alienist) with a felony not often encountered outside of legal textbooks: mayhem. This criminal charge was reserved for cases involving the act of disabling or disfiguring an individual, and it was punishable by up to fourteen years in prison. Brady immediately conferred with his assistant, August Fourtner, and Police Inspector George Engler about the matter. The group’s cursory research revealed that over ten thousand individuals in the state had been sterilized in public institutions since California had passed a law authorizing sterilization in 1909. There existed no record of the number of sterilizations performed in private practice, though some legal experts predicted the number was large. The law didn’t authorize these procedures, meaning that there could be hundreds—or even thousands—of individuals like Ann, whose rights had been violated. The most frequent techniques for sterilization were vasectomy and salpingectomy, which Ann had undergone. Castration and spaying were generally avoided, as these procedures didn’t merely render individuals incapable of producing children—they desexualized them. This last fact might present a conundrum for the San Francisco prosecutors, Brady realized. Mayhem cases hinged on proving that one’s body had been maimed, rendered useless,  or substantially changed in physical character. What if defendants argued that the primary purpose of sex was pleasure, rather than procreation, and therefore that the operation did not amount to an act of mayhem?

AUDREY CLARE FARLEY, HOW ONE WOMAN’S FORCED STERILIZATION LED TO A MAYHEM CHARGE AND EXPOSED A SECRET WORLD OF MEDICAL ATROCITIES – In early 20th century California, forced sterilizations were an unnervingly widespread, if mostly secret, practice. Grand Central Publishing APRIL 20, 2021 

This article says “The charges were eventually dropped against the doctors and her mother – with Ann settling for $150,000.  Maryon (the mother) died in April 1939, aged 55, following a stroke, while Ann, who married five times, died from cancer, aged 40, in February 1956” along with a few more tidbits, several photos and the following eugenics information:

THE HISTORY OF EUGENICS  In 1907, the eugenics Education Society was founded in Britain to campaign for sterilisation and marriage restrictions for the weak to prevent the degeneration of Britain’s population. In 1931, Labour MP Archibald Church proposed a bill for the compulsory sterilisation of certain categories of ‘mental patient’ in Parliament. Meanwhile from 1907 in the United States, men, women and children who were deemed ‘insane, idiotic, imbecile, feebleminded or epileptic’ were forcibly sterilised, often without being informed of what was being done to them. By 1938, 33 American states permitted the forced sterilisation of women with learning disabilities and 29 American states had passed compulsory sterilisation laws covering people who were thought to have genetic conditions. All legislation was eventually repealed in the 1940s.

CHLOE MORGAN FOR MAILONLINE, Tragedy of the ‘unfit heiress’: New book revisits case of 1930s socialite Ann Cooper Hewitt whose abusive mother had her forcibly sterilized to deprive her of her inheritance from millionaire inventor father, Daily Mail,  22 April 2021