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Last week California authorities were at sea concerning the legal aspects of Ann Cooper Hewitt's case. The State's 23-year-old sterilization law applies only to inmates of prisons and asylums. The legal adviser of the State Board of Medical Examiners was of the opinion that any parent may have a minor child sterilized, that the child's only recourse is to sue parent and physician within one year after attaining majority. Ann Hewitt's was the first such suit he knew of. At week's end an Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco offered, if Daughter Hewitt would back him up, to charge Mother Hewitt and the two physicians with mayhem, a felony punishable by one to 14 years imprisonment.
Of the heritage which joined with that of Peter Cooper, Abram Hewitt and Peter Cooper Hewitt to produce her, Ann Cooper Hewitt last week made the following affidavit, which was promptly confirmed by oldtime San Franciscans: "While my mother has always boasted of her Southern aristocracy, she was the daughter . . . of a horsecar driver in San Francisco who lived in a flat over a corner grocery store when she was a girl."