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GCSE History · key term
A medical procedure imposed without consent to prevent someone from having children.
Used by AQA and OCR
Paper 1
Revise: Social Policy and PracticeMeanwhile, forced sterilisation under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring prevented people judged to have certain hereditary conditions from having children. Nazi policy did not encourage motherhood for all women: it rewarded some while violently denying reproductive freedom to others.
Paper 1
A medical procedure carried out without genuine consent to make a person unable to reproduce.
Distinguish forced sterilisation, which prevented reproduction, from policies of killing. The child killing programme began in 1939; the centralised T4 killing of adult patients began in 1940.
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The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, enacted on 14 July 1933, mandated forced sterilisation of people placed in specified categories of supposed hereditary illness or disability. These included schizophrenia, hereditary deafness and blindness, and severe physical deformity. Nazi classifications rested on assumptions about heredity, not reliable proof that every person’s condition would be inherited by their children.