The State of Indiana in 1907 enacted a vasectomy law which obliges the superintendents of some prisons and asylums to appoint two surgeons whose office is to sterilize sexually criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and similar persons, if these surgeons, in consultation with the chief physician of the institution, deem the propagation of children by such so-called degenerates detrimental to society. The same law has been incorporated in the statutes by New York, New Jersey, Washington, Iowa, Nevada, Wisconsin, Connecticut, California, Utah, Kansas, Oregon, and Minnesota. The law has been proposed several times in the Legislature of Pennsylvania, but it was vetoed twice and held up once in the Assembly. In New Jersey there was question of sterilizing an epileptic girl, and the Supreme Court of that State[216] decided in 1913 that the law is contrary to the State and Federal constitutions. In 1916 Probate Judge Lapeer of Michigan declared the law as passed in his State in 1913 unconstitutional, but the State appealed against this decision. The Supreme Court of Washington[217] decided in favor of the law in a case where a man convicted of rape was sentenced by the trial judge to life imprisonment and to vasectomy as a punishment. The constitutionality of the Iowa law is on appeal to the United States Supreme Court after a Federal judge had declared it unconstitutional. The law in Indiana was put into effect in hundreds of cases, but Governor Marshall set the law in abeyance. Two Federal judges in Kansas said the law is unconstitutional and granted an injunction against its application in a particular case. In 1808 the superintendent of a Kansan institution for the feeble-minded castrated forty-eight boys. Up to April, 1916, about twenty-five feeble-minded boys in the Wisconsin institution at Chippewa Falls were sterilized, and the authorities then said they intended to sterilize the girls. The law has been advocated by alienists in Switzerland, and French and English physicians have advocated it. [216] _Smith vs. Board of Examiners of the Feeble-minded, 88 alt. R. 963._ [217] _State vs. Feilen, 126 Pac. R. 75._