Posted on 12/16/2002 6:39:08 PM PST by FreeSpeechZone
N.C.'s eugenics record revealed
Report: State program ranked 3rd in number of sterilizations
WINSTON-SALEM - North Carolina had one of the nation's most aggressive and longest-running eugenics programs, sterilizing 7,600 people -- including 2,000 children -- between 1929 and 1974.
Copies of secret state documents, examined and reported by the Winston-Salem Journal, revealed the extent of the influence exerted by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina.
North Carolina ranks third in the nation in numbers of sterilizations done through the program, the newspaper report said.
Until recently, few details were known about how the Eugenics Board operated or the nature of cases it handled. The Winston-Salem Journal obtained thousands of documents copied 10 years ago by Johanna Schoen, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa.
Among the documents, the newspaper reported it found:
• More than 2,000 people 18 and younger were sterilized in many questionable cases, including a 10-year-old who was castrated.
• The program was racially balanced in the early years, but by the late 1960s more than 60 percent of those sterilized were black; 99 percent were women.
• Doctors performed sterilizations without authorization, and the Eugenics Board backdated approval.
• Major eugenics research at Wake Forest University was paid for by a patron who had a racial agenda that included a visit to a 1935 Nazi eugenics conference and extensive efforts to overturn key civil-rights legislation.
The Wake Forest University School of Medicine has begun investigating its role in the eugenics movement.
More than 30 states had sterilization programs, but North Carolina's expansion after 1945, when most other states had rejected the science, and its targeting of blacks made it different than most, experts say.
"That's quite astounding," said Steve Selden, professor at the University of Maryland and author of "Inheriting Shame: the Story of Eugenics & Racism in America."
The program was run by the state Eugenics Board, a panel of five people who usually decided cases within a few minutes.
Supporters of the eugenics movement claimed sterilization could eliminate mental illness, genetic defects and social ills.
"They don't want to hear how I feel, or what's going on in my mind. You're pregnant -- you need to get sterilization," said Nial Cox Ramirez, recalling her sterilization in 1965 after having a child out of wedlock. "And they had the nerve to tell me, `That's what's best for you.' "
Since Schoen obtained her copies of the records 10 years ago, the N.C. Office of History and Archives has denied other requests, and the records are officially closed to the public.
"I think the problem is that there are cases where sterilization was the solution -- but sterilization authorized by the Eugenics Board is never the solution," Schoen said.
California led the nation with more than 20,000 sterilizations; Virginia was second with about 8,000, and North Carolina third.
North Carolina's eugenics law, allowed three reasons for sterilization: epilepsy, sickness and feeble-mindedness.
But the board almost routinely approved sterilizations for reasons from promiscuity to homosexuality.
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Mon Dec 16,10:32 AM ET
By Nopporn Wong-Anan
BANGKOK (Reuters) - The United States came under fire at a UN conference Monday for its opposition to abortion and contraception, which critics said was jeopardizing an international agreement on population and development.
Rights groups and ministers attending the conference of more than 30 countries in the Asia-Pacific said Washington's position put the health of millions of women in the region at risk.
"The impact of such an extreme agenda--if approved--would be both brutal and unjust for the women and families of this region," Terri Bartlett, vice president of Population Action International, said in a statement at the conference.
UN members have negotiated for much of the past decade toward an international agreement in support of family planning and the promotion of safe sex to stop the spread of HIV (news - web sites)/AIDS (news - web sites) and to prevent unplanned pregnancies.
Supporters of the agreement say a deal was ready to be signed but the United States said this week it objected to some clauses that implied support for abortion and contraception that the Bush administration opposes.
The Republican US government, backed by evangelical Christian groups in the United States, is strongly opposed to abortion and argues the best form of family planning is abstinence from sex.
Washington wants to delete language calling attention to the impact of unsafe abortions on women's health, and a reference to "consistent condom use" as a means of reducing HIV infection.
But Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the United Nations (news - web sites) Population Fund, said in a speech Monday that the International Conference for Population Development (ICPD) program did not imply support for abortion.
"The language of the ICPD Program of Action is extremely clear," Obaid said. "In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning."
"The phrase 'reproductive health services' is not code for the promotion or support for 'abortion services,"' she said.
Defending Washington's stand, Eugene Dewey, State Department Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees and Migration, told a news conference US efforts to amend the pact's language to comply with its own laws had been hit by a "horrendous disinformation campaign.
"It disturbs me, the disinformation campaign which has been perpetrated by some participants of this conference. It spreads the lie that the US is trying to pull back or to overturn the ICPD plan of action. This is absolutely false."
Dewey said that whatever the outcome of the UN meeting ending Tuesday, Washington would continue funding UN agencies for family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention schemes.
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