Sterilization in 20th Century Eugenics Program

North Carolina will become the first state to compensate victims of a mass sterilization program that targeted poor minorities in a 20th century eugenics program, offering a $50,000 a person.

In a vote today, the Eugenics Compensation Task Force recommended the lump-sum amount, putting a three-year statute of limitations on claiming those funds. The state sterilized more than 7,600 people in North Carolina from 1929 to 1974 -- one of many other states in misguided attempts to weed out criminals and the mentally disabled.

Only North Carolina, home to the third most prolific sterilization program in the nation, has recently made moves to compensate its victims. North Carolina sterilization program was at its peak during the civil unrest and exploding welfare costs of the 1960s. It was the only state where social workers had the right to suggest "clients" for sterilization and the eugenics board seldom turned down those recommended -- they had a 95 percent acceptance rate. What's more, the program created a climate where doctors felt entitled to take sterilization into their own hands, doling them out when they saw fit, she says.

Instead of sterilizations taking place in mental institutions, in a few southern states they became more common in rural hospitals where poor unmarried women would be sterilized without their knowledge after coming in to give birth. In North Carolina, 85 percent of sterilization were performed on women as young as 9-years-old.

Last year, ABCNews.com interviewed Elaine Riddick, a poor, victim of child molestation who was robbed of her ability to have children. Pregnant by rape, young Riddick went into a North Carolina hospital in 1968 to give birth to her son. Years later, she learned she was sterilized.The decision was made by the North Carolina Eugenics Board, a five-person state committee responsible for ordering the sterilization of thousands of individuals in the name of social welfare.

Deemed "promiscuous" and "feebleminded" by a social worker at the hospital, Riddick, who came from a black family on welfare, was recommended to the state for sterilization shortly after arriving. Riddick's illiterate grandmother, was told that they were doing a "procedure" that was necessary to help the young girl and signed the sterilization papers with an "X". The state authorized and paid for the procedure, and without her consent or even her knowledge, Riddick was sterilized shortly after giving birth. She was 14 years old.
"They didn't have permission from me because I was too young and my grandmother didn't understand what was going on," Riddick, now 57, said. "They said I was feebleminded, they said I would never be able to do anything for myself. I was a little bitty kid and they cut me open like a hog."
"I was raped twice," she says, "once by the perpetrator and once by the state of North Carolina."
At some point in the century, more than half of the states in the U.S. had similar programs that allowed for the sterilization of those the government deemed unfit to procreate.

When most programs began in the early 1930s, this usually meant those in institutions for mental illness or mental retardation, but over the decades criminals, the blind, the deaf, the disabled, alcoholics, those with epilepsy and ultimately the rural poor on welfare would fall under the umbrella of "unfit to procreate."

In all, 65,000 Americans were sterilized before the last program was shut down in the early 1980s.

 

I live in NC and they had more guts than the three dozen states who just sent a apology.

 

Wow

the white man has done it again

just when you thought they couldn't get anymore diabolical

 

"Today Eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems." - Margaret Sanger

 

Eugenics = scary shit.

Especially when this article mentions people from the 20th century, but it still happens today.

Kinda makes me wanna get knocked up soon-ish, so that in a few years it wouldn't be law to test an embryo's genetics and say, "Sorry, there's a deaf gene and you'll have to abort". I can feel that coming...

Glad that the people affected by the 20th century going ons would be compensated for what they've went through... but too bad people didn't know the difference to begin with and that those people had to have such an awful experience/miss the opportunity to have children.

 

Hmm, would still somewhat be a 'designer baby', if you're so certain it's gonna be a girl... Selecting a girl over a boy.