It is wrong because as a punishment it is neither effective nor necessary nor reformatory nor exemplary nor reparative--it lacks every quality of a justifiable punishment. In Dr. Sharp's list of vasectomies done in Indiana prisons, 176 operations were done on men who voluntarily asked for vasectomy. There is no pain, no inconvenience caused by the operation, no sexual change perceptible, but a fitting of the criminal to indulge his lust without the various inconveniences of impregnation. Instead of being reformatory, it is conducive to crime. I find only one man who objected to vasectomy.[247] In this man vasectomy was added to life imprisonment as a punishment for rape. [247] _State of Washington vs. Feilen, 126 Pac. R. 75._ The legislators in the States which have passed the vasectomy law all seem to have been influenced by the pseudoscientific notion that criminality is a hereditary condition, a physical disease, and not a matter of volition. This Lombrosan absurdity is now held by no physical scientist, and from an ethical point of view it is nonsense. Moreover, if the State vasectomized all the criminals in the jails, this method would not appreciably affect the supply of criminals, nor reach an appreciable minority of the criminal class, as the most dangerous criminals are not in jails. The operation is not a punishment to the men upon whom it is done, but it is an unnecessary deprivation of an essential right of these men, an excessive, ill-ordered attack on a primary right of man, and an act of violence against human nature and its Author without adequate reason. The law is against the natural order because it directly deprives a man, and that against his will, of functions which are at times a moral necessity to him, and puts him into the occasion of sin. Vasectomy does not remove his venereal desires, but gives opportunity to lust; it turns the conjugal relation into mere onanism and degrades marriage into a crime. Other conditions, like military service, in which necessity obliges the State to place its citizens and thus prevent the conjugal relation, cause an indirect temporary prevention, reluctantly permitted, not directly intended. Vasectomy is an evil directly intended. It is to the interest of the State to prevent the transmission of hereditary disease, and in doing so it may to a certain degree curtail the natural liberty of its citizens. When the peril is great, as in a plague, the State may isolate infected individuals, and thus indirectly, but temporarily, prevent a natural right--namely, the conjugal relation. It may even perpetually isolate, as in leprosy. Vasectomy, however, is a direct prevention without reason, and it is done as a direct evil means to effect a so-called end which it never attains.