Court Opinion

ID: 9727778
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 13:50:17.315454+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:21:38.209479
License: Public Domain

HARRIS, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. However it is worded the pending application comes down to a matter of forced termination of reproductive rights. If a more inappropriate instance for judicial innovation exists I cannot imagine it.
The majority obviously possesses the power to claim jurisdiction over this application. It can do so, if it chooses, by asserting some fundamental or inherent power. It could, if it chooses, search out some real or imaginative statutory justification. See Iowa Code § 633.635(2)(b) (1987). But it is inappropriate and unwise to do so. There is a difference between jurisdiction and authority. See City of Des Moines v. Des Moines Police Bargaining Unit Ass’n, 360 N.W.2d 729, 730 (Iowa *5811985). We should not claim authority in an area which should be and has long been within the exclusive province of the legislature.
I. Reproductive rights for retarded persons make up a subject which is, to put it mildly, shot through with searching social and ethical questions which are as controversial as they are complex. In taking this first wide leap the majority commits itself to the eventual resolution of a twisted conglomeration of attendant social and ethical issues. Future litigants, faced with unanswered questions of great social and ethical dimensions, or with missing ingredients of a vague application process, will continue to press us for determinations which we are singularly unfit to reach.
At what level of mental retardation can sterilization be compelled? Will other mental abnormalities subject a person to sterilization? Will any other afflictions? Will a decision to compel sterilization be a matter of the probate court’s discretion? What board or body, if any, will suggest statewide standards? Can any branch of district court, other than probate, entertain applications? If so, does that change our scope of review on appeal? Will an attorney be required to represent the person to be sterilized? Who will pay attorney fees and by what authority? Who will pay other court costs? To whom will the sterilization order be directed? What voice does the person being sterilized have in selection of a physician? How will the court order be structured as to the manner of the sterilization, time, and place? If there is resistance how will the order be enforced?
The good news is that the majority, in obvious and wise recognition of its inability to do so, chooses not to address these questions. The bad news is that the majority consigns them to Iowa’s individual trial judges for ad hoc determinations. Iowa’s trial courts must now face these and, undoubtedly, a host of other public policy decisions under the majority holding.
II. The legislature has not answered these complex social questions because it has withdrawn the state from participation in involuntary sterilizations. See Annotation, Jurisdiction of Court to Permit Sterilization of Mentally Defective Person in Absence of Specific Statutory Authority, 74 A.L.R.3d 1210, 1214 (1976) (“[Fjact that previously enacted sterilization statute was repealed ... may be construed ... as evidence that the legislature did not intend to invest the judiciary with the jurisdiction to permit sterilization.”). Iowa’s first sterilization law was enacted in 1911, 1911 Iowa Acts ch. 129. It has been repealed and superseded a number of times. See The New Iowa Statute on Sterilization of Defectives, 15 Iowa L.Rev. 238 (1930). Our most recent act, many times amended, appeared as Iowa Code chapter 145 (1977). It set up the state board of eugenics and provided a careful process to screen and consider applications for involuntary sterilization. After many years the plan was repealed. 1977 Iowa Acts ch. 77. In repealing it, a clear legislative choice was made. This time the repealed process was not supplanted by another one.
The majority cites In re Eberhardy,1 102 Wis.2d 539, 307 N.W.2d 881 (1981), as precedent for jurisdiction over this application. Eberhardy is, however, precedent for declining to interfere in what should be a legislative process. The Eberhardy majority quoted Justice Frankfurter:
Courts are not equipped to pursue the paths for discovering wise policy. A court is confined within the bounds of a particular record, and it cannot even shape the record. Only fragments of a social problem are seen through the nar*582row windows of a litigation. Had we innate or acquired understanding of a social problem in its entirety, we would not have at our disposal adequate means for constructive solution. The answer to so tangled a problem ... is not to be achieved by ... judicial resources_
Id. at 571, 307 N.W.2d at 895-96 (quoting Sherrer v. Sherrer, 334 U.S. 343, 365-66, 68 S.Ct. 1087, 1102, 92 L.Ed. 1429, 1444 (1948) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)). The Eberhardy concurring opinion pointed out that the involuntary sterilization question, at best,
is a most difficult one and should never be made by courts alone as it involves a value judgment central to the constituent fabric of our society. We all ought to be involved in making this decision whether we participate as a litigant, judge, attorney, physician or as an American citizen, voting for elective representatives. In an age when the courts are for the first time declaring retarded individuals to be of equal worth with other individuals in our society and under our constitution, mandating equal educational and training opportunities, it seems anomalous that equal justice is being threatened.
Id. at 591-92, 307 N.W.2d at 905.
Even without this long history of legislative activity the subject is prototypical of those which cry out for legislative and not for judicial solution. Unlike our own branch of government, the legislative branch is equipped to devise systems on the basis of findings after hearings before a committee. In that way a workable process could be fine-tuned on the basis of carefully worked out and arrived at public policy decisions. Courts are ill-equipped to embark upon such a venture and are ill-advised to do so.
I would affirm.

. The guardians also cite and quote from Justice Holmes in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207, 47 S.Ct. 584, 585, 71 L.Ed. 1000, 1002 (1927) (upholding mandatory sterilization law and noting that "[i]t would be strange indeed if [the public] could not call upon those who ... sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices ... in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence_ Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”). Buck v. Bell, which is often cited by those favoring involuntary sterilization, involved the constitutionality of a Virginia statute and not a claim of inherent common law court jurisdiction. Even so, the opinion is facing continued and increasing criticism. See Dudziak, Oliver Wendell Holmes as Eugenic Reformer: Rhetoric in the Writing of Constitutional Law, 71 Iowa L.Rev. 833 (1986).