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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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A Shameful Little Secret
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| Parent(s) |
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| Contributor | Brandonius Maximus |
| Last Edited | Brandonius Maximus Mar 21, 2005 11:44am |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Monday, March 21, 2005 05:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | March 28 issue - Elaine Riddick dreamed of motherhood. She and her husband tried to conceive for months without luck, so they consulted a doctor. The diagnosis was shocking: she had been sterilized four years earlier without her knowledge.
She soon learned that the operation had been performed by state order in North Carolina in 1968, when she was just 14, and had given birth to a baby after being raped. At the time, she'd assumed doctors were just performing a routine post-birth procedure. The sterilization-consent form had been signed by her neglectful father and her illiterate grandmother, who had marked her assent with an X. Today, three decades later, she's still reeling from the revelation she blames for the death of her marriage and her eventual hysterectomy. "I felt like I was nothing," says Riddick, her fists clenched in anger. "It's like, the people that did this, they took my spirit away from me."
Now North Carolina is pondering ways to make amends to Riddick and thousands of others sterilized as part of the eugenics (or "good breeding") movement that began nationally in the early 20th century and continued into the 1970s. The state offered a public apology two years ago. Now lawmakers are debating ways to make reparations to those robbed of the chance to be parents. More than 30 other states had eugenics programs during the last century; they were ruled constitutional in Buck v. Bell, a 1924 Supreme Court decision that is still the law of the land. Roughly 70,000 Americans in all were sterilized before the notion fell out of favor, becoming linked in the public's mind to Hitler's Germany after World War II. But North Carolina is the first to appoint a panel to study what to do now for its victims, from health care and counseling to financial reparations. The state is also considering addressing the shameful practice—finally halted in 1974—in its classrooms. "Some people have tried to pretend it never happened," says North Carolina Stat |
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