RetroClips

By the early 1930s, more than half of US states had eugenics laws on the books, and tens of thousands of Americans -- prisoners, psychiatric patients, the poor -- had been forcibly sterilized under them, a practice the Supreme Court upheld in Buck v. Bell (“three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority). Tomorrow's Children turned that policy into a ticking-clock melodrama: a seventeen-year-old ordered sterilized because of her parents' problems, and a race to stop the surgeons before it's too late. The filmmaking is clumsy, but the target was real, and versions of the law it argues against stayed on the books in some states into the 1970s.