The Sterilization League of New Jersey (SLNJ) organization was founded in 1937 by Marion Stephenson Olden (1888–1989), a eugenics-minded social worker and wife of Princeton professor Paul R. Coleman-Norton (Dowbiggin, 2008, p. 36), with the purpose "to aid in the preparation, promotion, enactment and enforcement of legislative measures designed to provide for the improvement of the human stock by the selective sterilization of the mentally defective and of those afflicted with inherited or inheritable physical disease.” Encouraged by the eugenic sterilization legislation enacted by the state of Georgia in 1937, the SLNJ lobbied intensely, although unsuccessfully, between 1939 and 1942 for the passage of a state sterilization law in New Jersey and conducted an educational program of publications and exhibits designed to promote sterilization.
In 1943, the League was renamed Sterilization League For Human Betterment and began to expand its activities nationwide. After objections from relatives of Ezra Gosney, founder of the Human Betterment Foundation, the organization formally incorporated and changed its name again to Birthright, Inc.: a national, nonprofit, educational organization with the aim of promoting "all reliable and scientific means for improving the biological stock of the human race.” When the Human Betterment Foundation was dissolved in 1943, its promotional activities for eugenic sterilization were continued through Birthright, which received most of the Foundation's records regarding its work on sterilization programs and also the (financial) support of such past Foundation-backers as C.M. Goethe, Paul Popenoe, and Lois Gosney Castle, who had succeeded her father in 1942 as head of the Foundation.
The Manhattan studio at the New York Academy of Medicine of Robert Latou Dickinson, who had been a member since 1943 and became the first chairman of the organization's medical and scientific committee in 1949, served as new headquarters in 1950. That same year, Birthright was renamed the Human Betterment Association of America (HBAA).