By Kim Severson, The New York Times, December 8, 2011
The Eugenics Board of North Carolina sterilized Charles Holt when he was a teenager. |
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.
The reasons were
chilling, reports from state records and interviews with survivors and
researchers show.
There was a
14-year-old girl deemed low-performing and “oversexed” who came from a home
with poor housekeeping standards. A man who raped his daughter at 12 signed her
sterilization consent when she was 16 and pregnant. A mother of five was deemed
to have a low I.Q.
Victims began
filing a handful of lawsuits in the 1970s, but outrage has been slow to build.
In 2002, The Winston-Salem Journal ran a series of articles on eugenics,
prompting official apologies and initial legislative efforts aimed at
compensating victims.
But nothing came of
it until Governor Perdue, a Democrat, took up the cause. She has vowed to put
money in the 2012 budget. The House speaker, Thom Tillis, a Republican, said in
October that he, too, would work on a bill to compensate victims.
But how much to
include? Is $20,000 per victim, a figure suggested by some, enough?
“How can you quantify
how much a baby is worth to people?” asked Charmaine Fuller Cooper, executive
director of the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims
Foundation, which is financed by the state. “It’s not about
quantifying the unborn child, it’s about the choices that were taken away.”
The issues go
deeper than just a dollar amount. The task force has to decide whether money
should go only to those living or to the estates of the dead, whether a tubal
ligation is worth more than a vasectomy.
One variable is how
many people will actually sign up to get the money. The state estimates that
about 3,000 victims of state-mandated sterilizations may still be alive. Of
those, 68 have been verified in state records. But not all sterilizations were
done through the state board. Counties had programs, as did private doctors who
were part of the eugenics movement. Those people will not qualify for state
compensation, Ms. Fuller Cooper said.
Still, her office
in Raleigh receives about 200 calls a month. People who suspect they were part
of the state program must send her a notarized letter. Then, their names have
to be found among eugenics board records stored in dozens of cardboard boxes in
the basement of the state archives. People have died or moved or use different
names. It is needle-in-a-haystack work.
Some critics of the
effort say the state is not working hard enough. Victims and others argue that
names in the archives could be matched to drivers’ records.
But the state
cannot just send letters to people’s houses suggesting they might have been
sterilized against their will, Ms. Fuller Cooper said. Medical records are
private. Husbands or adopted children could find out a long-buried secret. Old
wounds could be laid open again.
Even people who
call her office sometimes hang up abruptly when a spouse approaches, wanting to
keep their terrible secret unless money is on the table.
“Until folks know
what the state’s going to do, people aren’t going to take the risk and come
forward,” she said.
One woman who
submitted her name fears it will become public. In a recent interview in her
small home in Lexington, N.C., she said she would be embarrassed if her
co-workers at a local hospital knew her story.
Now 62, she was
adopted but sent to a state school at 7 because her parents thought she was mentally
deficient. She remembers being told as a teenager that she was getting an
appendectomy. When she was 27 and started having uterine trouble, a doctor
requested her records and discovered that she had been sterilized in an
operation that had been botched, her medical records show.
“I tell you what,”
she said. “I about hit the floor.”
She went to her
mother, who said she was going to tell her before she got married. Welfare
would have ended if she had not consented, her mother said.
She
did marry, and her husband, who has since died, accepted the fact that they
could not have children. Still, she was forever changed.
“I see people with
babies and I think how much I would have loved to have a young one,” she said.
“It should have been my choice whether I wanted to have a baby or not. You just
feel like you were held back, like you never had any say in your life.”
She figures what
she went through is worth at least $50,000 or $100,000. “Maybe I could retire,”
she said.
Mr. Holt still
remembers that October day. He thought he was getting an examination so he
could leave the state home. He said he did not know he was giving up his chance
to be a parent.
“The doctor told me
I couldn’t go home unless I had an operation done,” said Mr. Holt, who was 19
at the time. “When I woke up I tried to walk, and I said: ‘This ain’t right. I
don’t even remember them shaving me down there.’ ”
He went on to marry
and divorce. Now recovering from a stroke and surviving on disability payments,
he lives with relatives in a tidy trailer park in the middle of the state.
He thinks maybe
$30,000 would be enough. Others want more. Elaine Riddick, 57, who also lives
in Atlanta, was sterilized in 1967. She was 14 and had gotten pregnant from a
rape. Social workers persuaded her illiterate grandmother to sign the consent
form with an X.
She has become the
most vocal proponent of payment, suing the state for $1 million. Her case was
appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which refused to hear it.
For Nial Ramirez,
65, who was sterilized at 18 after she gave birth to her daughter, no amount
could make it right.
A social worker
from the Washington County Department of Public Welfare suggested that she get
sterilized. Mrs. Ramirez said she did not understand that the procedure was
permanent and thought she had no choice.
“They told me that
my brothers and sisters were going to be in the streets all because of you,”
she said. “It’s either sign the paper or mama’s checks get cut off.”
In 1973, with the
help of the American Civil Liberties Union, she became the first person to file
a lawsuit against the state eugenics board. It ended with a $7,000 settlement
from the doctor, she said.
Now in a small
apartment surrounded by the sound of the television and some of the 200 dolls
she has collected through her lifetime, Ms. Ramirez remains angry. She does not
want an apology, and she will not settle for the amounts being discussed.
“What
would an apology do for me?” she said. “You don’t know what my kids were going
to be. You don’t know what kids God was going to give me. Twenty thousand
dollars ain’t gonna do it, honey.”
No comments:
Post a Comment