North Carolina has become the first state to compensate victims of sterilization programs. The Eugenics Compensation Task Force has offered $50,000 per person as a form of apology. I'm glad that task force member Demetrius Worley Berry said that "this is not an attempt to compensate, repair or restore what happened years ago." Because there is no dollar amount that can rectify yet another tragic part of American history.
In case you haven't heard all about the horrific sterilization program that North Carolina(and more than half the states in the U.S.) imposed on people that they determined to be unfit to reproduce,here's an excerpt from a piece written about this diabolical experiment in eugenics from The Winston-Salem Journal:
"They were wives and daughters. Sisters. Unwed mothers. Children. Even a 10-year-old boy. Some were blind or mentally retarded. Toward the end they were mostly black and poor. North Carolina sterilized them all, more than 7,600 people.
For more than 40 years North Carolina ran one of the nation's largest and most aggressive sterilization programs. It expanded after World War II, even as most other states pulled back in light of the horrors of Hitler's Germany.
Contrary to common belief, many of the thousands marked for sterilization were ordinary citizens, many of them young women guilty of nothing worse than engaging in premarital sex.
I don't want it. I don't approve of it, sir. I don't want
a sterilize operation.... Let me go home, see if I get along all right.
Have mercy on me and let me do that. — A woman pleading with the eugenics board, 1945.
The sterilization program ended in 1974, but its legacy will not go away. Many of its victims are still alive and they bear witness to a bureaucracy that trampled on the rights of the poor and the powerless.
In response to a Winston-Salem Journal investigation of the state sterilization program, the Wake Forest University School of Medicine is looking into its own role in the eugenics movement.
The state program was run by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, a panel of five bureaucrats who usually decided cases in a few minutes. It was inspired by the eugenics movement, which made exaggerated claims that mental illness, genetic defects and social ills could be eliminated by sterilization. The system granted excessive power to welfare workers, browbeat women into being sterilized and had ineffective safeguards.
“They don't want to hear how I feel, or what's going on in my mind. You're pregnant — you need to get sterilization,” said Nial Cox Ramirez, recalling her sterilization in 1965 after having one out-of-wedlock child.
“And they had the nerve to tell me, "That's what's best for you,'” she said recently.
North Carolina sealed most records of the eugenics board and until recently few details were known about how the board operated, or the nature of cases it handled." (End of Excerpt) Read more of this excellent report here.
