Set in 1932, at the height of prohibition and the growing American eugenics movement, the state of Vermont passes a law allowing for sexual sterilization of "idiots, imbeciles, feeble minded or insane persons likely to procreate." Dormancy follows a young woman and her new husband who work the land and earn a small income herding sheep and working with lumber. The couple is lured into a rural clinic where they subjected to the sadistic goals of the doctors and eugenics field workers. For this modest family, life will never be quite the same...