From the 1930s until the 1970s, authorities in North Carolina carried out a program that would be unthinkable in this country today: They pushed thousands of people to be sterilized.
As The New York Times reports, social workers were given the power to pick the candidates for state sterilization. The social workers typically targeted uneducated young girls who had been raped by older men, poor teenagers from large families, people with epilepsy and those deemed too “feeble-minded” to raise children.
In all, 31 states in the 20th century practiced what is known as eugenics, a crude social engineering practice once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool. It was pushed by wealthy businessmen and supported by such leading figures as President Woodrow Wilson and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Most states, however, shut down their programs by the end of the 1940s, after recognizing the parallels between their practices and the Nazi atrocities during World War II.
These days North Carolina, which had one of the nation’s most aggressive eugenics programs, is wrestling with the state’s obligation to its estimated 7,600 victims, including 3,000 thought to still be alive. A task force appointed by Gov. Bev Perdue is trying to determine how much to offer victims as compensation, and it also wants to provide mental health services to survivors. Its actions are likely to set an example for other states with eugenics legacies of their own.
North Carolina’s effort, however, faces considerable challenges. Among them will be persuading state legislators, at a time of severe budget squeezes, to provide substantial compensation to the victims.
Privacy concerns also complicate the work. It’s difficult for the state to locate victims, in part because, to protect the confidentiality of medical records, the state cannot send letters to people’s houses suggesting they might have been sterilized against their will.
The Times also pointed out that victims, who might not want spouses or adopted children to find out about a long-buried secret, sometimes are reluctant to come forward.
STUART SILVERSTEIN
