Image via WikipediaWednesday, June 22 2011 09:34 PM
Barely 40 years ago, more than half of U.S. states had eugenics laws that made it legal for states to sterilize people against their will. North Carolina is now considering compensating those victims. On Wednesday, a state panel heard from some who were mostly poor, uneducated — and often just girls when it happened.
Nearly 7,600 men, women and children as young as 10 were sterilized under North Carolina's eugenics laws. While other state sterilization laws focused mainly on criminals and people in mental institutions, North Carolina was one of the few to expand its reach to women who were poor. Sterilization was seen as a way to limit the public cost of welfare. Social workers would coerce women to have the operation under threat of losing their public assistance.
A small collection of photos shows an unsettling part of American history.
What is certainly the most intriguing — and probably the most numerous — collection of eugenics-related photographs can be found in a scrapbook assembled by the members of the American Eugenics Society, now in the holdings of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
The American Eugenics Society promoted ideas of racial betterment and genetic education through public lectures, conferences, publications and exhibits at county and state fairs —
The North Carolina Eugenics Board was created in 1933 and operated for decades with little public scrutiny. It used rudimentary IQ tests and gossip from neighbors to justify sterilization of young girls from poor families who hung around the wrong crowd or didn't do well in school.
In a way, this makes perfect sense. Born out of a society that was still making the transition from agricultural to industrial, much of the eugenics argument was based on the idea that we selectively breed our livestock for desired traits; why not do the same with human society? As one sign asks, "Are you a thoroughbred?
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