Virginia brings back eugenics!

I'm pretty sure that the judge wants to sterilize him because of the neck tattoo.

RICHMOND, Va.— A Virginia man who has fathered children with several women has agreed to get a vasectomy to reduce his prison term by up to five years in a child endangerment case that has evoked the country’s dark history of forced sterilization.

None of the charges against Jessie Lee Herald, 27, involved a sexual offense. Shenandoah County assistant prosecutor Ilona White said her chief motive in making the extraordinarily unusual offer was keeping Herald from fathering more than the seven children he has by at least six women.

“He needs to be able to support the children he already has when he gets out,” she said, adding that Herald and the state both benefit from the deal, first reported by the Northern Virginia Daily.

Though Herald willingly — if reluctantly, according to his attorney — signed on to the deal, the agreement immediately calls to mind the surgical sterilizations carried out in Virginia and dozens of other states during the 20th century under the discredited* pseudoscience called eugenics, said Brandon Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor.

...

Some 8,000 people deemed genetically inferior or deficient were forcibly sterilized in Virginia from the 1920s to about 1970. Many other states also had eugenics programs but abandoned them after World War II when forced sterilizations became closely associated with Nazi Germany’s racial purity efforts.

*Discredited by whom? When? What's your citation? Which studies apparently"discredited" eugenics? The same studies that "discredited" Freud? I think what the law professor (who wouldn't know anything about science or "pseudoscience") meant is that eugenics is no longer fashionable. Eugenics is alive and well in the United States (see the +90% rate of elective terminations after in utero diagnosis of Down's Syndrome).