From Carolina Public Press:
One of North Carolina’s darkest chapters is creeping into the light, as a state task force has released data indicating that Buncombe County was a key player in a state-authorized sterilization program that ran from the late 1920s to the early 1970s.
Under the program, which was overseen by the N.C. Eugenics Board in Raleigh, an estimated 7,600 people were sterilized. Some individuals submitted to the sterilizations willingly, while others were forced or coerced into losing their ability to reproduce. The board authorized sterilizations for people with epilepsy and other disabilities, individuals characterized as “feebleminded” or compulsively criminal, along with many who were judged too reproductive for their limited economic means.
The task force, created in March of this year by Gov. Beverly Perdue, is charged with determining the best way to compensate the surviving victims, who, according to state estimates, could number as many as 3,000.
The task force is staffed by a new state government office, the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation. Newly compiled data issued by that office this week, identifies the number of sterilizations in each N.C. county during the peak years of the eugenics campaign — 1946 to 1968 — when some 70 percent the total sterilizations occurred.
The data show that while sterilizations were generally less common in Western North Carolina than in other parts of the state, Buncombe County was an exception: among the state’s 100 counties, Buncombe had the fifth most sterilizations, with a total of 139.Read the full article
One of North Carolina’s darkest chapters is creeping into the light, as a state task force has released data indicating that Buncombe County was a key player in a state-authorized sterilization program that ran from the late 1920s to the early 1970s.
Under the program, which was overseen by the N.C. Eugenics Board in Raleigh, an estimated 7,600 people were sterilized. Some individuals submitted to the sterilizations willingly, while others were forced or coerced into losing their ability to reproduce. The board authorized sterilizations for people with epilepsy and other disabilities, individuals characterized as “feebleminded” or compulsively criminal, along with many who were judged too reproductive for their limited economic means.
The task force, created in March of this year by Gov. Beverly Perdue, is charged with determining the best way to compensate the surviving victims, who, according to state estimates, could number as many as 3,000.
The task force is staffed by a new state government office, the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation. Newly compiled data issued by that office this week, identifies the number of sterilizations in each N.C. county during the peak years of the eugenics campaign — 1946 to 1968 — when some 70 percent the total sterilizations occurred.
The data show that while sterilizations were generally less common in Western North Carolina than in other parts of the state, Buncombe County was an exception: among the state’s 100 counties, Buncombe had the fifth most sterilizations, with a total of 139.Read the full article
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This information, long overdue, would be more meaningful if we knew the number of sterilizations as a percentage of county population for each of the years the data was collected.
At any rate, though, how cruel and disheartening, although not totally surprising!
By Betty Cloer Wallace
06/20/2011
It would also be interesting to know the names of the "well-meaning?" physicians who performed the procedures.
By D. Dial
06/20/2011
I imagine the degree of "enthusiasm" of each county's person-in-charge-of-eugenics had a lot to do with it, along with the county's political climate at the time.
By Betty Cloer Wallace
06/20/2011
Betty, you raise a good couple of questions. As for the percentage of each county's population, that measure will be available with the new numbers. Statistically, though, I don't think it will be too instructive, in that no matter how you crunch the numbers, the number of people sterilized, while far too high, will be pretty minuscule. In other words, far, far less than one percent of N.C. residents were ever sterilized, in any county.
But there were gradations that will tell us a lot about this program and who it preyed upon. The studies done thus far seem to make it clear that women got targeted vastly more than men. That poor folks got targeted vastly more than wealthier ones. And that black and brown folks, while they weren't the initial focus of the eugenics campaign, increasingly became the focus in the program's later years.
Here's hoping we get some more-definitive studies soon. In the meantime, the best one on North Carolina's experience with eugenics appears to be Johanna Schoen's "Choice and Coercion," which deserves a close look by anyone who wants to know more: http://bit.ly/iTOtVF.
I like her book for many reasons, including the fact that she delves into how many eugenics proponents were also proponents of women's right to choose their reproductive options. In other words, there were more complexities to the situation, and to the choices made during the era in question, than a quick hit like this article can convey.
By Jon Elliston
06/21/2011
Thanks, Jon, for the link to Johanna Schoen's book, Choice and Coercion. The tragic story of Estelle in the Introduction is worth the price of the book.
Actually, the book and your subsequent research appears to be even more than an indictment of the state's "health care" system or an overview of women's incredible struggles for reproductive autonomy in North Carolina.
It shows a century of transformation of cultural, social, political and religious obstacles that--if the uber-right-wingers have their way--will continue to thwart the individual rights of women for another century.
Young women today don't have a clue what their mothers and grandmothers have gone through--having society at large in control of their bodies, minds, children, education.....
By Betty Cloer Wallace
06/21/2011
It appears that the fundamentalists are hell bound that personal decisions will be removed from the "little woman."
By D. Dial
06/21/2011
And most insidious of all, Davyne, are those arrogant fundamentalists who--when they run out of arguments for preserving the past--begin to castigate anyone who disagrees with them as "feebleminded" and "ignorant" and "don't know what you're talking about."
What those fundamentalists don't see is that ultimately they are destroying, rather than improving, the very institutions upon which they stake their claims--the institutions of marriage and church, both of which young women are abandoning in droves.
By Betty Cloer Wallace
06/21/2011
There was compelling testimony in Raleigh today from living victims. Here’s the Raleigh News & Observer’s coverage, “People Who Were Sterilized by the State Tell Their Storiesâ€: http://bit.ly/j5OjpN
By Jon Elliston
06/22/2011
Good on Governor Perdue for pushing this forward!
Perdue is a former Special Ed/Exceptional Children teacher who clearly knows what has happened historically to persons in North Carolina who are usually female, usually poor, usually non-white, and/or otherwise disenfranchised as human beings under the prevailing dominance of white male christians.
Thanks, Jon, for your coverage of this.
By Betty Cloer Wallace
06/22/2011