of it was passive. You know, not feeding a baby, accidentally forgetting some old man’s antibiotics if he came down with an infection. She had a million stories from working in the town hospital. But, yeah, Lissa’s right. They had other ways. I think if the institution my granny was in hadn’t closed down, I probably wouldn’t be here.”
We all look at her. Even me, although it hurts to move my head.
“What?” I say.
Ruby Jo puts on a sour face. “Don’t you get it? I just said I almost wasn’t. Like, at all.”
I do get it, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to get it in the same way I don’t want to get leprosy or syphilis or cancer.
Ruby Jo looks us over and shakes her mop of red hair. “Remember how I told you about Oliver Wendell Holmes? There’s something else he said. He said that if we had laws to cover mandatory vaccinations, we could have laws to tie up your Fallopian tubes. And that’s what they near about did to my granny back in 1957. Someone figured out they didn’t need to kill anyone. They just needed to stop them from breeding.”
Lissa pipes up. “And it went on for decades, right up until 1979.”
I fight my way to my feet, taking the folded paper from my sleeve. “No. You’re wrong. It’s still going on.”
If there’s a thin strand of light in this room where Ruby Jo sits lost in thought and Lissa presses a cool cloth to my head, it’s the documents I found earlier this afternoon. None of them points to a solution as final as the eugenics committee’s proposal of elimination. This is when I push the women away and go back to the kitchen table; I page through the appendix of Lissa’s book. My eyes float down to number nine on the list and I will them to focus, concussion or no concussion.
What I read in Martha Underwood’s office fits perfectly with the ninth remedy proposed by the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders’ Association:
Neo-Malthusian doctrine, artificial interference to prevent conception.
Ruby Jo has been quiet, staring out of our barred window toward the larger building across the grounds, and this time I’m the one asking if she’s all right.
“Sure. Just thinking there ain’t enough room for all of them,” Ruby Jo says without turning. “The dormitories are large enough to handle a few hundred boys and girls each, but not much more. And I haven’t seen any signs of construction on the grounds of State School 46. Then again, it’s a big country. They could always build new schools. Or—”
“Or not. They could stifle population growth,” I say, smoothing out the page I stole, closing my eyes and trying to picture the other sheets of paper, recalling the salient terms. “But everything I saw smacks of sterilization—permanent contraception.”
Lissa nods, expressionless, waiting for me to go on. The hardness in her eyes tells me she can handle it.
I hope I can. I take a deep breath, slide a sheet of notepaper toward me on the table, and draw a line vertically from top to bottom. In the first column I write the heading Fertile Stage; in the second, Pre-Fertile Stage. “Premenstrual girls are in the second category,” I explain. “Everyone else is in the first.”
Again, a nod. Lissa gets it.
The second part is trickier to explain, so I simplify. “If you want to prevent conception in fertile women, you have two main choices: surgical or chemical. Surgical is riskier—not that I think anyone gives a shit, but they might care about the cost and logistics of opening up millions of abdomens just to tamper with a pair of tubes. Chemical sterilization is easier. Less risk, less time, less cost. And it’s just as effective.”
Lissa wants to know how it works. I’m not sure I want to tell her. The thought of someone pushing a bunch of quinacrine hydrochloride through my cervix with the intention of burning my insides is too gruesome to articulate. But I tell her anyway. “The idea is to initiate sclerosis in the uterus.” I draw her a quick sketch of an isosceles triangle with the