US state to recommend money for forced sterilization victims
Source: Agencies |
January 11, 2012, Wednesday
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IT'S a question that has not been answered before and doesn't have an easy solution: How do you repay people for taking away their ability to have children?
North Carolina's Eugenics Compensation Task Force is the first in the nation to tackle that question and was set yesterday to recommend how much to pay victims of forced sterilization, along with whether the victims' descendants are eligible for the money.
"If we all agree that there is no amount that restore somebody's loss of ability to procreate, then it's understood that the ultimate figure is an attempt to put out an active apology instead of a verbal apology," said task force member Demetrius Worley Berry, a Greensboro attorney. "This is not an attempt to compensate, repair or restore what happened years ago."
State officials sterilized more than 7,600 people in North Carolina from 1929 to 1974 under eugenics programs, which at the time were aimed at creating a better society by weeding out people such as criminals and mentally disabled people considered undesirable.
The panel has discussed amounts between US$20,000 and US$50,000 a person. At the panel's meeting last month, Berry suggested paying US$20,000 to living victims, though chairwoman Laura Gerald said she wanted to consider a higher amount.
Victims reacted angrily, saying they deserved more money, and descendants argued the estates of victims who have since died also should be paid. Some have suggested as much as US$1 million per victim.
"I think that what they're doing is unfair, and I think that they're looking at North Carolina in a cheap way," said Delores Marks, 60, of Durham. "And I think they're just trying to have something to present so that they'll go ahead and approve it and get it out of the way."
Marks' mother, a black woman with four children, was sent to a psychiatric hospital in 1953 after showing signs of what Marks thinks was probably postpartum depression. She returned to her family after a few months at the hospital, where she was sterilized.
The state Legislature would have to approve any compensation to victims. The task force has said 1,500 to 2,000 of the victims are believed to be alive. Officials have found 48 of them so far.
Many states ended their eugenics programs because of associations with Nazi Germany's program aimed at racial purity, but North Carolina in fact ramped up sterilizations after World War II.
The state's sterilizations peaked in the 1950s, with about 70 percent of all sterilizations performed after the war, according to state records. The program didn't officially end until 1977. It is one of about a half-dozen states to apologize for eugenics programs.
Most victims were poor, black women deemed unfit to be parents.
North Carolina's Eugenics Compensation Task Force is the first in the nation to tackle that question and was set yesterday to recommend how much to pay victims of forced sterilization, along with whether the victims' descendants are eligible for the money.
"If we all agree that there is no amount that restore somebody's loss of ability to procreate, then it's understood that the ultimate figure is an attempt to put out an active apology instead of a verbal apology," said task force member Demetrius Worley Berry, a Greensboro attorney. "This is not an attempt to compensate, repair or restore what happened years ago."
State officials sterilized more than 7,600 people in North Carolina from 1929 to 1974 under eugenics programs, which at the time were aimed at creating a better society by weeding out people such as criminals and mentally disabled people considered undesirable.
The panel has discussed amounts between US$20,000 and US$50,000 a person. At the panel's meeting last month, Berry suggested paying US$20,000 to living victims, though chairwoman Laura Gerald said she wanted to consider a higher amount.
Victims reacted angrily, saying they deserved more money, and descendants argued the estates of victims who have since died also should be paid. Some have suggested as much as US$1 million per victim.
"I think that what they're doing is unfair, and I think that they're looking at North Carolina in a cheap way," said Delores Marks, 60, of Durham. "And I think they're just trying to have something to present so that they'll go ahead and approve it and get it out of the way."
Marks' mother, a black woman with four children, was sent to a psychiatric hospital in 1953 after showing signs of what Marks thinks was probably postpartum depression. She returned to her family after a few months at the hospital, where she was sterilized.
The state Legislature would have to approve any compensation to victims. The task force has said 1,500 to 2,000 of the victims are believed to be alive. Officials have found 48 of them so far.
Many states ended their eugenics programs because of associations with Nazi Germany's program aimed at racial purity, but North Carolina in fact ramped up sterilizations after World War II.
The state's sterilizations peaked in the 1950s, with about 70 percent of all sterilizations performed after the war, according to state records. The program didn't officially end until 1977. It is one of about a half-dozen states to apologize for eugenics programs.
Most victims were poor, black women deemed unfit to be parents.
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