A young woman wishes to marry her boyfriend and raise a family, but because her own family has been deemed "defective" by the state health authorities--her parents are lazy alcoholics who continue to have children, and several of her brothers and sisters have mental problems--she is ordered by a court to undergo sterilization so that her family's "defective genes" won't be passed on to any more children. Her boyfriend and a kindly priest desperately search for a way to stop the forced sterilization before it's too late.