William Josephus Robinson (December 8, 1867 – January 6, 1936) was an American physician, sexologist and birth control advocate. He was Chief of the department of Genito-Urinary Diseases at Bronx Hospital Dispensary, and editor of the American Journal of Urology and Sexology.[1] Robinson was active in the birth control movement in the United States.[2] He was "the first American physician to demand that contraceptive knowledge be taught to medical students and [...] probably the most influential and popular of the American physicians writing on birth control in the first three decades of the twentieth century".[3]
As well as his own medical writings, Robinson edited the works of the pioneering pediatrician Abraham Jacobi. He was also a freethinking critic of Christianity.[4]
He was a proponent of Eugenics, which is a form of scientific racism, and published the following works advocating forced sterilization: Fewer and better babies, birth control; or, The limitation of offspring by prevenception, 1916 and “Eugenics, Marriage and Birth Control: (Practical Eugenics), 1917. He stated that people of an inferior nature “have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but, having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind."[5]
