As the state legislature convenes Wednesday, Gov. Bev Perdue should present it with a clear plan for helping the surviving victims of North Carolina's forced sterilization program. Some might argue that, with thelegislature facing the challenge of closing a $3.7-billion budget shortfall, this is not the time to help those victims. But with the victims continuing to suffer with physical and emotional ills from their operations, and with some of them having died waiting for help, the state has a moral obligation to finally right the wrong it visited upon them.
In an interview with the Journal Thursday, Perdue reaffirmed her commitment to helping the victims sterilized by the state program. "This is a tragic story for North Carolina," she said.
Perdue, a Democrat, and the legislature's new Republican majority should finally help these people who were stripped of their right to give life by a program that was, before it ended in 1974, one of the most aggressive in the country. Now, some of the victims believe that the state is waiting for them to die. "The wait breaks my heart," said Annie Buelin, 72, of Surry County, who was sterilized when she was 13.
The state could help the victims without a great expenditure of funds. Eight years ago, Gov. Mike Easleyapproved a committee's recommendations that the victims be given health-care and education benefits, but the now-disgraced Democrat never followed through on getting those recommendations approved by thelegislature. The benefits could be done relatively easily through the state's university and community-college system. Financial compensation, long talked about, will have to wait until the economy improves.
Responding to these victims — as many as a third of the more than 7,600 sterilized may still be alive — should be an effort that crosses party lines. In late 2002, when a Journal investigative series, "Against Their Will," reported for the first time the full details of the program, people of varied political viewpoints were outraged. The victims — men, women and children of modest means — were often bullied into sterilization by aggressive social workers carrying out a program based as much on thinning the welfare rolls as it was on misguided goals of "bettering" society. The effort, whose supporters included doctors and philanthropists in Winston-Salem, violated the sanctity of life.
For eight years, the victims have courageously shared their stories with the public, and politicians have promised to help them. "They keep talking: 'We're going to do something. We're going to do something.' They haven't done anything," said Nial Cox Ramirez, who was sterilized in 1965 in Washington County when she was 18.
Perdue promised to help as she ran for her position in 2008. She secured $250,000 for a foundation to study compensation for the victims. But Perdue and the foundation have been moving slowly. And the subject has already been studied at length. The process of sterilization — including voluminous paperwork that was often trumped-up — usually took a year or less. The state is moving much slower in helping the victims than it did in hurting them, despite repeated pleas from the victims' only real advocate in the legislature, DemocraticRep. Larry Womble of Winston-Salem.
Some of the victims have died waiting for help. For example, a 90-year-old woman, sterilized after she was raped when she was a homeless teenager in Winston-Salem, died in July. "I think the state should definitely do something for the victims," her granddaughter told the Journal.
North Carolina's sterilization program began in 1929 and was based on the junk science of eugenics, which had warped goals of improving society by rendering barren people classified as "feeble-minded," (often on the basis of flawed intelligence testing) as well as epileptics, the blind and others deemed unfit to reproduce. After World War II, as the horrors of Hitler's genocide were exposed, the other states backed off their eugenics programs. But North Carolina ramped up its under-the-radar program. By the 1960s, the program was targeting black women, even as the state was then seen by many as progressive in integration.
When Easley approved the recommendations for health-care and education benefits, he set North Carolina on a path toward doing what no other state with such a program had done: providing compensation for the victims. Should the legislature take that step now, our state would still be the first on compensation.
In doing so, Perdue and the Republican majority would set an example of bipartisan cooperation for the nation. But most important, North Carolina would at last be doing right by thousands of dying and aging victims of a program it should never have started.
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