Agenda 2012: Compensation for Sterilization Victims | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: Agenda 2012 is the John Locke Foundation's charge to make known their wise political agenda to voters, and most especially candidates, with our thirty-fourth instalment being "Compensation for Sterilization Victims," written by Jon Sanders, Director of Regulatory Studies at the John Locke Foundation. The first installment was the "Introduction" published here.

    From 1929 to 1977, the State of North Carolina forcibly sterilized about 7,600 of her own people for possessing "undesirable" genetic traits in the name of eugenics. The practice, whose names derives from the Greek eugenes, meaning "well-born, of high stock," was a program pushed by Progressives in the early 20th century intending to deliberately further human evolution by preventing undesirables from reproducing and thereby fostering the reproduction of "desirable" members of society.

    North Carolina's program got its start before Nazi Germany's, and the state was by no means the only one infected by the eugenics movement. More than 30 U.S. states had similar laws. North Carolina was, however, one of only a few states not to cease its program after seeing the hideous results of the Nazis' program.

    All three branches of government in North Carolina failed to protect victims of its forcible sterilization program. The legislature approved the law, the executive branch implemented it through the North Carolina Eugenics Board, and the judiciary upheld the law as constitutional in In Re Moore in 1976, going so far as to declare it the "duty" of the legislature to enact sterilization laws and "limit a class of citizens in its right to bear or beget children with an inherited tendency to mental deficiency, including feeblemindedness, idiocy, or imbecility," so as to "protect the public and preserve the race from the known effects of the procreation."

    The state government itself committed the wrongs against sterilization victims. A state eugenics task force is currently discussing how North Carolina can provide victims compensation.

Key Facts

   • Over three-fourths of the approximately 7,600 victims of North Carolina's forcible sterilization program were sterilized after 1945; i.e., after the fall of the Third Reich.

   • As early as 1935, however, the North Carolina Eugenics Board understood that sterilization could not address the underlying concern for the "public good," writing in a report that "We do not know precisely to what extent mental defects and psychopathic conditions are inherited."

   • Sterilization was recommended for people deemed to be epileptic or "mentally diseased." Over 70 percent of sterilizations were of people assigned the vague, catch-all categorization of "feebleminded."

   • Victims had essentially no legal recourse. The U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927) upheld the constitutionality of state sterilizations (the opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is chilling), setting the stage for eugenics laws in North Carolina and other states.

   • The Eugenics Board approved about 90 percent of the sterilization petitions it received. Though victims could appeal the Eugenics Board's decision to sterilize, few had the means or ability to do so.

   • Most sterilizations were involuntary (about 6 percent were voluntary), and when informed consent was secured from parents or guardians, it was usually through threats or through parents not understanding what they were signing.

   • Up to 2,000 victims of forcible sterilization are still alive, but just over 100 have been verified so far.

   • Article I, Section 1 of the North Carolina Constitution declares, "We hold it to be self-evident that all persons are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor, and the pursuit of happiness." The state eugenics program violated fundamental rights of the state's citizens for the "public good."

Recommendation

    Provide compensation to living victims of the state sterilization program.
    Be exceedingly wary of future legislation that would abridge fundamental rights for "the public good," "the greater good," or words to that effect.


    Analyst: Jon Sanders

     Director of Regulatory Studies
     919-828-3876 • jsanders@johnlocke.org