Over the summer North Carolina has make strides toward offering restitution for its shameful history. It’s Eugenic Task Force began hearing the horrendous testimonies of some of the men and women who endured irreversible surgical sterilization as part of a state-sponsored policy that was enforced from 1929 until 1974.
For the duration of the program, about 7,600 people, including youth as young as 10 years old, were sterilized to allegedly rid society of undesirable characteristics.
American eugenics programs were used to preserve segregation policies and to address the influx of European immigrants in the early 1900s.
The ideology was promoted as a way to prevent passing on mental illness and other objectionable traits in order to obtain and maintain America’s genetic standards.
Eugenics was also a prominent program in liberal California in 1909. Former Stanford president David Starr Jordan championed eugenics decrees that allowed authorities to desexualize promiscuous women, sexual offenders, and other criminals as a form of punishment.
Latin Americans were disproportionately targeted, in part due to societal preconceptions of the day regarding birth control and sexuality in general, while African Americans, who made up 1 percent of the state’s population, accounted for 4 percent of those surgically altered.
Depending on the circumstances, it was legal to castrate men or remove the ovaries from females, although records indicate officials generally resorted to tubal ligations or vasectomies, simply because these methods are faster and cheaper.
http://ourweekly.com/features/north-carolina-compensate-victims-forced-sterilization
