North Carolina to compensate sterilization victims

Preemptive Genocide: Only Now Are Reparations Being Made to Eugenics Victims

By Anne MinardWhen North Carolina announced earlier this year that it intends to be the first state to compensate victims of decades-ago sterilization programs, it renewed a nationwide debate over the need to acknowledge and amend the travesties of similar programs in other states. Tens of thousands of women, men and even children were sterilized from the early 1900s through the middle part of the century. Often, the victims were misled about the treatments they were undergoing; sometimes they were pressured or even forced to cooperate. Most had been deemed unfit to reproduce, often because they weren’t white and sometimes because they were ruled mentally inferior. The programs all were justified by eugenics policies meant to improve the gene pool.

Advocates for the thousands of Native women who were victimized by such programs say another motivation lurked behind the horrific abuses. “This was a concerted attack on Indian American women that constituted genocide,” says Andrea Carmen, a former sterilization activist from the Yaqui Nation who now serves as executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council.

The advocates say apologies in recent years by North Carolina and a handful of other states are a start, but the real healing can come only after an apology at the national level. They say that’s what it will take to combat the racism that led to the sterilization programs and is still evident today.

The list of abuses is varied but invariably shocking: Native women going in for C-sections and coming out with tubal ligations; Native girls going in for tonsillitis and coming out with tubal ligations; young Native women being given hysterectomies after being told that they were reversible; Native women being used in Depo-Provera trials without being informed of the risks; Indian Health Service (IHS) workers implanting the controversial Norplant capsules in a patient’s arm, but claiming to lack the training to remove it, even when it caused complications.Comment:  For more on sterilization, see Vermont to Apologize for Sterilization? and Sotomayor, Empathy, and Sterilization.

Below:  "Carmen (left) has been working on this issue since the 1970s; Asetoyer says that there are many more victims out there."

Vermont to apologize for sterilization?

Vt. lawmakers weigh apologizing for eugenics

By Dave GramIf the state of Vermont had carried out a plan to sterilize his grandmother, Don Stevens said Tuesday, he “wouldn’t be here.”

Many Vermonters of mixed French Canadian and Native American heritage, like Stevens’ grandmother, as well as poor, rural whites, were placed on a state-sanctioned list of “mental defectives” and degenerates in the 1930s and placed in state institutions like the Home for the Feeble Minded in Brandon.

Some had surgery after Gov. Stanley Wilson in 1931 won enactment of a sterilization law. It was designed to reduce the number of people seen as placing demands on public services, and to purify what University of Vermont zoology professor Henry Perkins, a national leader of the so-called “eugenics” movement, called “the fine old stock of original settlers in Vermont.”

Now the Vermont Legislature, which once endorsed breeding people like cattle, is considering a resolution expressing regret. It vows never to repeat “this dark chapter in Vermont’s history” and expresses the Legislature’s “profound sorrow and sincere regret that such a program of sterilization was sanctioned.”Comment:  For more on the subject, see The Straight Dope on the Sterilization of Native Women.

Sotomayor, empathy, and sterilization

'Empathy' on 1927 Supreme Court might have saved thousands from the knife

By Michael Hiltzik[W]hen the political fight broke out over Sonia Sotomayor's assertion that a judge's ethnic and socioeconomic background might actually influence how he or she interprets the law, I cracked the history books to find support for that fairly obvious point.

The best illustration turns out to be a 1927 case known as Buck vs. Bell. Or as it might otherwise be known, the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the imbeciles.

Holmes, perhaps the most revered of all Supreme Court justices, was always proud of his opinion in Buck vs. Bell, which upheld a Virginia law allowing the forced sterilization of "mental defectives." Yet the terse ruling proclaims, in each of its four chilling paragraphs, the narrow elitism of his personal life experience. And its consequence was tens of thousands of ruined lives over the next half-century.More on the Buck case:The case of Carrie Buck arose at a time when the pseudo-science of eugenics had achieved broad currency. Eugenics held that intelligence was an inherited trait, and that the "feeble-minded" or "socially inadequate" should therefore be forcibly sterilized to preserve the human race.

As the historian William E. Leuchtenburg observed in a 1989 essay, the target group encompassed the "wayward," the tubercular, the "blind, deaf and deformed," orphans, paupers and the homeless. Eugenicists seemed wholly untroubled by "the transparent class bias, not to mention the heartlessness toward the handicapped, in this classification scheme," he wrote.

When opponents of Virginia's sterilization law brought her case to the Supreme Court, Buck was 18 and a resident of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, where Superintendent J.H. Bell held the authority to order the sterilization of his wards--"under careful safeguard" of their due process rights, Holmes would write.

Holmes accepted at face value the state's contention that Buck was "a feeble-minded white woman, . . . the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child." Upholding society's interest in avoiding the "transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc.," he produced one of the most infamous sentences in the annals of the court.

"Three generations of imbeciles," he wrote, "are enough."Comment:  Thousands of Native women were sterilized using the same "logic" and perhaps the same ruling. Sotomayor's position is that her background might lead her to rule differently in such cases.

As Hiltzik wrote, "Is this really arguable?" I'd have to say that anybody who argues against this position is an imbecile.

For more on the subject, see Sotomayor Practices "Tribal Justice"? and Sotomayor Favors "Reconquista"?