Community | December 11, 2011 | 18 comments

Thousands Sterilized, a State Weighs Restitution

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/us/redress-weighed-for-forced-sterilizations-in-north-caro...

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By KIM SEVERSON
Published: December 9, 2011

LINWOOD, N.C. — Charles Holt, 62, spreads a cache of vintage government records across his trailer floor. They are the stark facts of his state-ordered sterilization.

The reports begin when he was barely a teenager, fighting at school and masturbating openly. A social worker wrote that he and his parents were of “rather low mentality.” Mr. Holt was sent to a state home for people with mental and emotional problems. In 1968, when he was ready to get out and start life as an adult, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina ruled that he should first have a vasectomy.

A social worker convinced his mother it was for the best.

“We especially emphasized that it was a way of protecting Charles in case he were falsely accused of having fathered a child,” the social worker wrote to the board.

Now, along with scores of others selected for state sterilization — among them uneducated young girls who had been raped by older men, poor teenagers from large families, people with epilepsy and those deemed to be too “feeble-minded” to raise children — Mr. Holt is waiting to see what a state that had one of the country’s most aggressive eugenics programs will decide his fertility was worth.

Although North Carolina officially apologized in 2002 and legislators have pressed to compensate victims before, a task force appointed by Gov. Bev Perdue is again wrestling with the state’s obligation to the estimated 7,600 victims of its eugenics program.

The board operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.

Thirty-one other states had eugenics programs. Virginia and California each sterilized more people than North Carolina. But no program was more aggressive.

Only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people for sterilization. They often relied on I.Q. tests like those done on Mr. Holt, whose scores reached 73. But for some victims who often spent more time picking cotton than in school, the I.Q. tests at the time were not necessarily accurate predictors of capability. For example, as an adult Mr. Holt held down three jobs at once, delivering newspapers, working at a grocery store and doing maintenance for a small city.

Wealthy businessmen, among them James Hanes, the hosiery magnate, and Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, drove the eugenics movement. They helped form the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947, and found a sympathetic bureaucrat in Wallace Kuralt, the father of the television journalist Charles Kuralt.

A proponent of birth control in all forms, Mr. Kuralt used the program extensively when he was director of the Mecklenburg County welfare department from 1945 to 1972. That county had more sterilizations than any other in the state.

Over all, about 70 percent of the North Carolina operations took place after 1945, and many of them were on poor young women and racial minorities. Nonwhite minorities made up about 40 percent of those sterilized, and girls and women about 85 percent.

The program, while not specifically devised to target racial minorities, affected black Americans disproportionately because they were more often poor and uneducated and from large rural families.

“The state owes something to the victims,” said Governor Perdue, who campaigned on the issue.

But what? Her five-member task force has been meeting since May to try to determine what that might be. A final report is due in February.

This week, the task force set some priorities. Money was the most important thing to offer victims, followed by mental health services.

How much to pay is a vexing question, and what North Carolina does will be closely watched by officials in other states. In a period of severe budget cuts and layoffs, money for eugenics victims can be a hard sell to legislators.

States began practicing eugenics in earnest in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, driven by a philosophy of social engineering once so popular that President Woodrow Wilson, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Supreme Court and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, were ardent supporters.

Before most of the programs were closed down, more than 60,000 people nationwide had been sterilized by state order.

rest of story at link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/us/redress-weighed-for-forced-sterilizations-i...
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18 comments // Thousands Sterilized, a State Weighs Restitution

  • FoosMaster
  • squarethecircle
  • Leen61
  • squarethecircle
  • Leen61
  • cherry5000
  • Dagum
    • +5
      Dagum  

    • Even the Elitist rag,The New York Times is finally reporting on it.

      "The board operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool."

      An absolute abomination. Eugenics Official policy, under Color of Law until 1977.

      "President Woodrow Wilson, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Supreme Court and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, were ardent supporters."

      Eugenics has lost the the protection of law it once enjoyed. Like many popular elitist ideas it still continues in the form of discrete softcore/softkill eugenics.

      Planned Parenthood is still alive and open for business, killing black babies at a ratio of 5-1 to whites, engineering Margaret Sanger's pure race.

      Monsanto products are designed to cause sterilization. And the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation is all Africa spending billions on their eugenics initiatives.

    • 6 months ago
  • squarethecircle
  • ampersand
    • +4
      ampersand  
    • Dagum:

      Even given the context of common understanding about community health and eugenics in 1900, Margaret Sanger wasn't either a eugenicist, or a racist.
      She courageously worked at risk to herself to give women control over their own bodies, to protect them from sexual exploitation, an unending and unwanted series of livelong pregnancies, and disease.
      Your efforts to smear her have been part of long campaign by the fundamentalist far right to demonize her and Planned Parenthood.
      There is a fine new and extremely well-detailed biography of Margaret Sanger in bookstores currently. Get a copy and read it.
      Then, you can take things out of context and distort them, but at least you'll have a better command of the facts than repeating this drivel.

    • 6 months ago
  • squarethecircle
  • cherry5000
  • Leen61
    • +2
      Leen61  
    • ampersand:

      Thank you, ampersand. I saw a documentary on PBS about Margaret Sanger and she is not the monster that people on the right and some on the left are trying to make her out to be. She stood up for women's reproductive rights at a time when it was very dangerous to do so. Her own mother died because of all the times she was giving birth. There's alot of gray with many historical figures.

    • 6 months ago
  • Dagum
    • +2
      Dagum  
    • ampersand:

      Ampersand, that's an oddly out-of-character accusatory tone and borderline ad hominem attack from you.

      The NY Times has also concluded that Margaret Sanger was Eugenicist in the article above.

      My conclusion that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist is not based on smears from fundamentalists. They are not a very authoritative source. And it would be oddly out-of-character for the NY Times to base their conclusion that Margaret Sanger was Eugenicist on smears from fundamentalists.

      What is an authoritative source and what I based the assertion on in making my conclusion (and presumably the NY Times did as well) are Margaret Sanger's own words.

      Don't rely on the NY Time conclusion that Margaret Sanger was a Eugenicist. Read her words for yourself and be the judge:

      "We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

      ----Margaret Sanger's December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Original source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon's Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.--

      "Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need ... We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock."

      ---Margaret Sanger, April 1933 Birth Control Review.---

      "Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying ... demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism ... [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant ... We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all."

      ---Margaret Sanger. The Pivot of Civilization, 1922. Chapter on "The Cruelty of Charity," pages 116, 122, and 189. Swarthmore College Library edition.---

      "The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

      ---Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922. ---

      "Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race."

      ---Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12.---

      "Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.Margaret Sanger. "

      ---The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5.---


      It's not a comfortable thing to accept. But in history many historical figures have been simultaneously on both the right and wrong side of history. They often may have done right things for the wrong reasons are wrong things for the right reasons. As Leen61 said historical figures come in shades of grey. Margaret Sanger as a racist and a Eugenicist are the darker parts of her legacy.

    • 6 months ago
  • ampersand
    • 0
      ampersand  
    • Dagum:

      Well, first off I see that you've conflated the fact Margaret Sanger wanted to work with black ministers to encourage the availability of birth control, with racism on her part.
      I think that's quite the opposite conclusion to draw.
      Second, you cite a quote from a journal that "Margaret Sanger edited" as if the quote was hers.
      The idea she expressed in 1922 that birth control would ultimately "lead to a cleaner race" is a reasonable projection by an advocate for women's health and human health.
      The key point here is that In 1922 eugenics were not the dirty word they became after Hitler's lunatic pograms.
      There was an understanding, and at the time, given the information and science available, a legitimate concern that "idiots" (in the original exact term of extreme low IQ individuals) would breed more low IQ generations increasing over time.
      This was seen a disaster for the need to have intelligent citizens carry the responsible burdens of an egalitarian and democratic society
      One quite famous case at the time had one of the most respected jurists of the time find in a court opinion for sterilization that "three generations of imbeciles is enough."

      I am no doubt a bit testy on the subject to public figures being quoted out of context.

      Generally, I find that the more work that goes into making the attack, records the overwhelming need of the person creating the distortion to make extremely narrow or self-serving partisan points.

      When you make statements like:
      "Planned Parenthood is still alive and open for business, killing black babies at a ratio of 5-1 to whites, engineering Margaret Sanger's pure race."

      That's complete hogwash.
      Why don't you ask the next several hundred black and white women you meet how much they appreciate the health and reproductive services that Planned Parenthood provides.

      If you find what I've said here a purely an ad hominem argument, I'd disagree about that as well.

    • 6 months ago
  • Dagum
    • +3
      Dagum  
    • ampersand:

      I don't know how reasonable minds cannot see the statement "We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population," as not evidence of a deep seeded racism.

      "The idea she expressed in 1922 that birth control would ultimately "lead to a cleaner race" is a reasonable projection by an advocate for women's health and human health."

      How can you even say that? Women's right never had anything to do with cleaning or purifying the races.

      Also Look where the majority of Planned Parenthood's are located. It's no coincidence 80 percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are located in low-income, minority neighbors. Not the suburbs.

      Perhaps this one:

      "Give dysgenic groups in our population
      their choice of segregation or sterilization."
      -- Margaret Sanger, April 1932 Birth Control Review

      If Margaret Sanger's own words won't convince you maybe the forums she advocated her ideas at will.

      From her autobiography:

      "I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan...I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses...I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak...In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered." (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)

    • 6 months ago
  • COMMONSENSEFORCOMMONGOOD_COM
    • +3
      COMMONSENSEFORCOMMONGOOD_COM  

    • Tragically, this pales to the U.S. cooperation with Merck to develop sterility agents which could be undetectably introduced into common medicines or public food and water supplies, revealed in WBradley's recent post on the issue!

    • 6 months ago
  • squarethecircle
  • squarethecircle
    • +2
      squarethecircle  

    • think population control isn't something the government would impose on citizens? think again...this is just the tip of the iceberg they are willing to talk about.

    • 6 months ago
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