In 1963, This Heiress Was Forcibly Sterilized To Ensure She’d Never Receive An Inheritance

In 1963, the 21-year-old heiress Ann Cooper Hewitt made the front pages for suing her mother, Maryon, for half a million dollars.
She claimed that her mother paid two doctors to forcibly sterilize her in order to ensure that she would never receive an inheritance from her father’s estate.
Ann’s father, Peter Cooper Hewitt, was a millionaire who made his fortune by inventing the mercury vapor lamp in 1901.
He was also the grandson of a famous engineer who was responsible for several other inventions in the 19th century, like the steam locomotive and gelatin dessert.
Peter’s generational wealth, innovative nature, and business ventures helped expand his family’s riches.
By the time he died in 1921, his estate was worth $4 million, which equates to around $59 million today.
He left two-thirds of his estate to his daughter Ann and one-third to his wife, Maryon. The will also stated that Ann’s share would be given to her mother if she died without having kids.
In court, Ann argued that her mother knew about this stipulation, which was why Maryon had secretly paid two doctors to sterilize her without her consent under the guise of an appendectomy before she turned 21. After Ann’s 21st birthday, Maryon would no longer have any control over her medical care.
In 1934, Ann and her mother were at a beachside resort outside San Diego. They were having lunch when Ann suddenly felt intense pains in her stomach.

Dario Lo Presti – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
Back in San Francisco, her physician, Dr. Tilton Tillman, was waiting for her at the hospital. He told her that she had appendicitis and led her to a room where a psychologist named Mary Scally then started asking her a bunch of seemingly random questions related to history.
After the initial visit, Ann returned to the hospital four days later for her scheduled appendectomy. She stayed at the hospital for a few weeks to recover.
During that time, she overheard a few staff members refer to her as an “idiot patient.” She also heard her nurse telling Dr. Tillman over the phone that the patient “didn’t suspect a thing.”
That was when Ann learned her mother and Dr. Tillman had told everyone that she was mentally unsound.
She figured out that her appendix had been taken out, but her fallopian tubes were removed along with it. When she finally went home, she was prohibited from leaving her room. It was kept locked from the outside.
“My mother made me act as my own maid,” Ann claimed. “Not one housekeeper entered my room during my convalescence. I was forced to live with little more than the bare necessities or comforts of a poorhouse waif.”
She wasn’t allowed to communicate with anyone. The most human interaction she got during her imprisonment was when the maid wordlessly delivered a plate of cold food to her door. The heiress also revealed that this sort of treatment wasn’t new.
As a baby, she was kept in a crib with tall sides, so it was essentially like a cage. Her father was the only one who cared for her.
When Ann was 7 years old, her father died. Afterward, she hardly left the apartment. Her mother wouldn’t let her make any friends or have any boyfriends, even when she got older.
“Mother didn’t have one spark of affection for me, and she refused to permit others who did. She always called me an ‘imbecile’ and an ‘ugly duckling,'” Ann recalled.
“She hated my buck teeth and my humped shoulders. And the way my eyes cross when I am tired. She sometimes struck me when she noticed my eyes were going.”
Ann filed a civil suit against her mother and the doctors in January 1963. A San Francisco district attorney charged them with “mayhem,” a crime that was punishable by up to 14 years in prison. But in the end, the charges were dropped, and Ann settled for $150,000.
Maryon died of a stroke at the age of 55 in 1939. Ann married five times before dying of cancer at the age of 40 in 1956.
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