Right to Life? How about a State’s Right to Sterilize?

7 Comments

1. 

   BooMan on June 23, 2011 at 10:23 pm

   “State Sanctioned Crime” hyperlink is missing.

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     Oui on June 24, 2011 at 2:47 am

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     CBS News – Sterilization victim “raped by the state of NC”

     "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

2. 

   Oui on June 24, 2011 at 8:03 am

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   North Carolina Eugenics Program

   PRECIPITATING FACTORS AND PROCESSES

   Eugenics in the 1950s was largely a southern movement, as most other states were weaning off from sterilization.  Very little sterilization occurred in the 1930s in North Carolina (and in the other southern states) because the Great Depression resulted in funding crises that didn’t allow for sterilization to occur in full force in the south.  Therefore, sterilization picked up pace after WWII, especially during the mid-1950s (Castles, p. 1).

   One factor leading to the acceleration after WWII was the race issue.   Race has always been a very loaded issue in the south, as slavery was prominent there.  When slavery was legal, white slave owners encouraged the reproduction of their slaves in order to create bodies to work and sell.  However, this changed in the 1950s when slavery was abolished and the civil rights movement was gaining speed.  By the 1950s, some white people were becoming anxious about supporting blacks through welfare.  The heads of the agencies of welfare departments agreed on the value of sterilization for reducing general welfare relief and ADC (Aid for Dependent Children) payments (Winston-Salem, “Wicked Silence”).  

   Women, including wives, daughters, sisters and unwed mothers, were largely overrepresented.  They were labeled as either “promiscuous, lazy, or unfit” (Wiggins, p. 1), or more commonly, as “sexually uncontrollable” (Schoen, Choice and Coercion , p. 110).  Overall, women made up 84.8% of sterilizations (State Library, “Statistics”, p. 1).  However, more interesting is that the sterilization of men virtually halted in the 1960s, with only 2 sterilizations in 1964, and 254 sterilizations of women (State Library, “Sterilizations”, p. 1).  Therefore, after 1960, women accounted for 99% of sterilizations (Sinderbrand, p. 1). While many white women were sterilized, the state began to focus on sterilizing black women as they became the majority of the welfare population.  Black women were seen as highly uneducated, poor, and as having higher fertility rates than their white female counterparts.  Schoen noted that as the amount of black women on welfare increased “the public association between ADC and black female recipients was particularly close” (Schoen, Choice and Coercion, p. 109; see also “Reassessing,” p. 153).  Black women were presumed to have uncontrollable sexual behavior, and as these racial stereotypes were reinforced, black women became an even larger target for controlled reproduction through sterilization.

   CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND WELFARE BENEFITS

   Race also played a role in those targeted for sterilization.  During the Civil Rights Movement, petitions were sent to the state’s eugenics board for black women (Winston-Salem, “Wicked Silence”).  Overall, by the later 1960s, 60% of those sterilized were young, black women.

   There are two stories that were made public by two black women who were sterilized against their will at a young age in North Carolina.  The first is Elaine Riddick, who had been sterilized at the age of 14 by a state order in North Carolina in 1968 after giving birth to a baby after being raped.  When she was operated on she was not informed that she was being sterilized.  She only discovered this years later when she was trying to get pregnant with her husband.  She was part of the lower class and the consent form had been signed by her illiterate grandmother and neglectful father.  She blames the sterilization for ending her marriage and is still affected by the surgery, saying, “I felt like I was nothing.  It’s like, the people that did this; they took my spirit away from me” (Sinderbrand, p. 1).

   The Human Betterment League and the “benefits of eugenic sterilization”

   ‘The American Breed’: Nazi Eugenics and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund

   A study to fill the existing gap in the history of eugenics by presenting a detailed analysis of the origins of the Pioneer Fund. Pioneer is a foundation chartered in 1937 to support and publicize study on “heredity and eugenics” and “the problems of race betterment.” The paper focuses on the role of Harry Laughlin, one of he most successful publicists of the “racial radical” branch of the American eugenics movement, and Wickliffe Draper, a wealthy New Yorker who endowed the Pioneer Fund. The paper explores several archival collections, tracing contacts among Laughlin, Draper and the Nazi scientists whose work informed Hitler’s “racial hygiene” movement.

   The early program of Pioneer “research” and publicity is described through minutes of Pioneer Board meetings in 1937-’38. The Fund’s first project was an incentive plan to encourage Army aviators, a group of “eugenically superior” white men, to have additional children. Though his personal sympathy concerning the Pioneer agenda is unclear, future Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan was a founding Director and sat on the Pioneer Board for seventeen years.

   Against Their Will  

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

3. 

   TarheelDem on June 24, 2011 at 8:25 am

   The fact that a legislature dominated by conservative (and racist) Republicans felt obligated to come up with any settlement at all shows that this issue is not dead.  It’s not going away either through neglect or tokenism.

   The abortion issue was slow taking off in the South.  It was predominately a midwestern Catholic issue until the Moral Majority coalition was formed in the late 1970s specifically to defeat (then) Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter.  The Falwell crowd adopted anti-abortion rights as an issue.  The Catholics picked up the school voucher movement.  In the process of unifying around “moral issues”, they dropped some of their overt racism in order to appeal to morally conservative black Christians.  It is a tribute to the conservative black churches in the South that they saw the racism at the root of the Moral Majority.  They saw clearly that Falwell had not changed his racism but now was trying to wrap it in the Christian flag.

   So your hypoothesis about 1968 is probably wrong.  Most likely, the eugenics crowd saw free and low-cost abortions in NC as consistent with purifying the gene pool.  But this time through self-selection.  The 1970s were a time  in the South that a lot of folks thought we could put all of the crap behind us.  The GOP was in the early stages of building its massive infrastructure then.

   And my experience in American life is that it is folks like Elaine Riddick who are the (in Van Jones’s words) the “deep patriots”.  They are likely to consider America the greatest country on earth even as they push for justice.

   • 

     Oscar In Dallas on June 24, 2011 at 1:37 pm

     It was always wrapped in a “Christian” flag – that’s why I grew up with the words “Southern Baptist”, “Republican”, and “klansman” as synonyms…

4. 

   joe from Lowell on June 24, 2011 at 9:36 am

   Ten bucks says the libertarians explain this a progressive crime, because Margaret Sanger once sucked up to a Eugenics Society, and the Nazis used the word “socialist” for political purposes.

5. 

   Oui on June 24, 2011 at 11:49 am

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   Sterilization in Norway – a dark chapter?

   In 1997, Norway and Sweden received a heavy beating in the media upon the revelation that sterilizations had been routinely performed by the state as an instrument of social policy up until the 70s. Whilst international opinion was quick at hand to condemn the sterilizations and did not shy away from immediate comparisons to “Third Reich” practices, the facts and figures remained murky, unclear or even plain wrong. But how many sterilizations had really taken place, and more importantly, how many had been conducted against patients’ wills? Siri Haavie investigates the reasoning behind the sterilizations and asks whether it is time to reassess our sometimes all-to righteous moral outrage on sterilization.  

   • “Forced Sterilization” and Eugenism Before the European Court of Human Rights  

   "But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."