Can forced sterilization ever be ethical?

A British court still needs to decide whether to authorize the sterilization, at her mother’s own request, of a mentally disabled woman (see e.g. here and here). Reading only the headlines and initial paragraphs of the news entries devoted to the case, one might become worried that we are seeing here a resurgence of an abhorrent practice that gained much favour in the first half of the 20th-Century, in countries like Germany or the United States: i.e. the compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded for eugenic purposes. However, it is important to look at the particulars of this case in...