North Carolina officials are trying to figure out how to compensate survivors of their eugenics program. These men and women were never able to have children. Decades after halting the state-sponsored eugenics program, which forcibly sterilized countless young men and women, the state wants to compensate those victims who are still alive. Most were poor. More than 80 percent were girls and women. Some of the girls had been raped. Some had been raped by their relatives, including fathers who later signed for them to be sterilized.
North Carolina was not the first state to sanction sterilizations for those considered a burden to society—the state of Indiana holds that distinction, enacting its law in 1907. Eventually, 32 states passed eugenics laws, which provided for compulsory sterilizations of poor people, epileptics, persons with low IQ’s, and people of color. Tens of thousands of American citizens were sterilized against their will. When a test case, Buck v. Bell, was heard in 1927 by the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge the constitutionality of Virginia’s eugenics law, the revered Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that the law was not only constitutional, but that it made sense for states to take such actions. According to Holmes:
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
The case was never overturned, and Holmes later boasted about it being one of his better opinions. Ironically, the U.S. eugenics platform, which was embraced by the nation’s wealthy elite, including industrialists, politicians, and senior leadership of the American Medical Association, was the precursor to Nazi Germany’s eugenics program. Indeed, Germany’s eugenics law drew directly from model U.S. eugenics legislation. Representatives from Germany traveled to the United States to learn more, and senior organizers of the U.S. program later lamented that “they’re beating us at our own game.” The Virginia law at issue in Buck v. Bell was never overturned by the Supreme Court.
Inevitably, when I teach Health Policy, the students are ignorant of this past. To overcome their disbelief and move to the ethical and legal issues relevant to studying eugenics, I show documentaries, assign the Buck v. Bell case as a reading assignment, and include Paul Lombardo’s work, which is the most comprehensive that’s been written on the topic in their literature review. Eugenics programs were ubiquitous—including “Fitter Family Contests,” in which Americans voluntarily subjected themselves to evaluations about their beauty and hygiene at state fairs and the building of “colonies” to house those to be sterilized.
Students are particularly confused and dismayed about how such a wide-spread movement seemingly disappeared without a trace—after all, more than 30 states had passed eugenics laws.
Students’ naïveté is reasonable and to be expected, given that states moved from advertising how many hundreds and thousands they had sterilized each month during coming attractions at popular films, to virtual silence. World War II happened, and the images from Germany, along with reports about the millions who were sterilized there, sent a chilling reminder about our eugenics programs.
Sadly, however, U.S. eugenics programs went underground rather than shut down. They operated within the broader shadows of law and society. Eugenics programs, such as the one now under scrutiny in North Carolina, were legal. In fact, North Carolina sterilized its citizens from 1933 to 1977. Decades after World War II , the Nuremberg trials, and even international human-rights treaties, North Carolina continued to sterilize its citizens.
But there was a shift. The state turned to sterilizing poor black women. And one of them was the first to sue the state for violating her constitutional rights.
Now, the efforts of North Carolina’s government officials to review state records and possibly compensate the surviving victims raises questions about the value of victims’ losses. How should a state go about compensating victims? What is a baby worth? These are tough questions but the right type of inquiries to pursue—and though late, better now than never.
The state of North Carolina can never fully repay the victims of its sterilization program, but Gov. Bev Perdue’s efforts are a step in the right direction.
