Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-forced-sterilization-20120126,0,2398463.story

This article in the Los Angeles Times attracted by attention. In March of 1968 Elaine Riddick was a 14 year old dirt poor pregnant black teenager. According to this article the state of North Carolina determined that Ms. Riddick who had been impregnated as the result of a rape was determined by an administrative agency of the state to be 'feeble-minded' and therefore an undesirable person and the state's “Eugenics Board” determined that to 'protect' her and to 'protect society' that she should be sterilized so that she could no longer bear children. North Carolina at least had the 'decency' to await the birth of the child that she was carrying. According to the article her child, a son, was born on March 5, 1968. Several days later after obtaining the consent of her illiterate grandmother evidenced by an X on a consent form a physician severed her fallopian tubes and cauterized them and rendered her sterile. According to this article the state estimates that some 7500 people were forcibly sterilized. North Carolina now proposes to pay Ms. Riddick the paltry sum of $50000 dollars to compensate her for this terrible wrong and deprivation of a fundamental right. Ms. Riddick is understandably very angry about this. She has vowed not to accept such an insulting payment for the state's incredibly terrible violation of her fundamental rights that has so tragically affected her life. Apparently some 32 states engaged in such terrible conduct. It caused me to wonder if California was among those 32 states. I did a little research and found that California had its own forced sterilization program from 1909 through 1964.

On March 11, 2003 Governor Gray Davis issued an apology for this evil done to its 'undesirable' citizens. You can read Governor Davis' apology here. The press release announcing this apology recites that California began these forced sterilizations in 1909 under a law enacted by the California Legislature and that California forcibly sterilized “approximately” 19,000 'undesirable' Californians. California's eugenics program had the support of prestigious universities such as Stanford. It was supported by such notable entities as The Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. This was reported in a November 5, 2003 article entitled “Eugenics and the Nazis-the California Connection” written by Edwin Black and published in the San Francisco Chronicle. You can read that article here. Histories of this evil practice point out that the targets of the eugenics programs were racial and religious minorities and persons who were regarded as inferior such as people with seizure disorders and homosexual people and some people convicted of criminal offenses that were considered particularly heinous.

It is simply amazing to me that we fought a war to eradicate the threat of Nazism that wreaked havoc on an entire continent and who were experimenting with eugenics to create a pure Aryan race of people. The Nazis used eugenics under Josef Mengele. The Nazis used genocide and eugenics to eliminate Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other 'undesirables'. The US and its wartime allies decried Nazi eugenics and genocide. Yet we continued the practice of eugenic sterilization well into the seventh decade of the twentieth century without a second thought. Thirty-two states had eugenics laws. Indiana was the first to enact one and California the second state in 1909. This is as serious a violation of fundamental human rights, the right to bear children, as anyone can imagine.