204 THEODORE RUSSELL ROBIE 



She is likely to breed defective mulattos indefinitely. Will we improve so- 

 cial conditions by allowing conditions such as this to continue unabated? 

 In another family, the father (46) refused to work despite repeated jail 

 sentences for non-support. He is alcoholic and a mental defective of low 

 moron grade, and said to be the father of a number of illegitimate children, 

 three of whom are defective mentally, a fourth is nearly so, and the other 

 two are unknown to the writer, though probably inferior children. One of 

 these children contracted gonorrhoea at eight and a half years as a result of 

 a supposed rape by a man of fifty-two. (She had been set an example for 

 such a relationship by frequently witnessing her parents in the marital 

 embrace.) Considering her low mental capacity it is more than probable 

 that she made little effort to prevent this assault. Would it not have been 

 far better to have sterilized the parents of these two families rather than to 

 have this sordid story to relate now? 



I have the records of another family in which there were 9 children all 

 of whom are retarded mentally and most of whom are definitely mental de- 

 fectives; another family in which 16 children were born all of whom were of 

 moron intelligence or lower, the father being an illiterate mental defective, 

 and the mother mentally retarded as well as epileptic. A study of another 

 family tree shows the following: From 8 matings there were born 49 offspring, 

 two of whom are dead. Out of this group of 47 individuals there were 20 

 mental defectives and 10 more who were described as defectives. The other 

 17 are unknown quantities because of lack of information, but some of these 

 were undoubtedly defectives. One of the couples in this group propagated 

 13 children, all of whom were of defective or borderline intelligence. Other 

 couples propagated 7, 8, 9 and 10 children respectively. The detailed rec- 

 ords of the members of this clan if obtainable would doubtless show a trail 

 of pauperism, illegitimacy, prostitution, and crime similar to that found in 

 the classical study of the Jukes family. These family studies show the 

 positive necessity for sterilizing defectives if we hope to cut down the extent 

 of these social sores. Hundreds of similar degenerate family trees can be 

 found in the archives of any State Mental Hygiene Bureau. 



It is not an infrequent occurrence in medical practice to encounter fami- 

 lies in which 10, 12, or 15 or more children have been born. Does anyone 

 believe that such large families are desirable? Does any woman ever have 

 that many children from choice? I am convinced that she does not if she 

 is honest with herself or her physician. It has been shown that the rate of 

 infant mortality increases definitely as the size of the family increases. The 

 newspapers some time ago carried a story of a woman who had just had her 

 25th baby — thirteen of the brood, however, had luckily died. Otherwise 



