Birth control has been around for a long time. People think that the pill or the condom would take the top spot for number one, but no. What many people don't know is that sterilization is the number one form of birth control. Today, sterilization is a form of contraception for over 223 million couples (Scott and Glasier, 2003). Even though sterilization is the number one procedure, it has not always been performed with the consent of its participants. Sterilization is the medical act that renders a person incapable of reproducing and is intended to be permanent. Both men and women can be sterilized, the process for men is called a vasectomy and the procedure for women is called tubal ligation. The Beginning of the Story in the United States There is a long history of voluntary and involuntary sterilizations. It may not be known, but the United States is a major culprit of forced sterilizations, dating back to 1900. In 1907, the United States implemented a policy of forcibly sterilizing “unwilling” and “unwitting” people (Krase, 1996) . In 1924 Virginia adopted a law to reduce the tax burden, because public benefits for the "insane" and "feeble-minded" had increased (Lombardo). The first person to be chosen to be sterilized was a seventeen-year-old girl named Carrie Buck. His mother was already an inmate in an asylum, the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and the Deeblemined (Lombardo). The people at the Virginia Colony asylum told Carrie that since she shared the same traits as her mother, mental weakness and sexual promiscuity, she would be sterilized so that she could not pass on those traits again; at this time Carrie already had a daughter. She was seen as a perfect candidate for the new Virginia movement. This case ended up in court and... middle of paper... the Mississippi appendectomy. Even in the North, teaching hospitals performed hysterectomies on poor black women so that their residents could practice (Roberts, 2000). Conclusion It is very sad to see that sterilization has been going on for so long. Many people, including myself, are unaware of the horrible things that have happened in the history of America and the world. I hope we now have and will never succumb to this kind of thing again. The era of forced sterilization is an evil time and should never have begun. It seems that sterilization is now a thing of the past, but is it really so? There has been talk that California forcibly sterilized female state prison inmates as recently as 2010; even though it was outlawed in 1979. Hopefully America and the world are past it, but there's always a chance we could go back to the old ways.