The states that sterilized individuals under eugenics laws must follow North Carolina's example and repay those still alive.


The North Carolina legislature recently budgeted $10 millionto compensate living victims — likely fewer than 200 -- who were sterilized under 20th Century eugenic laws. Each person will probably receive approximately $50,000, and that state's legislative measure will be remembered as a historic first in America. But unless other states act quickly, history will also recall that thirty-one other states had sterilization statutes, and future generations will be astounded that most of them have neither voiced a word of regret nor voted a dollar for victim compensation.

Beginning in 1907, more than 65,000 men, women and children were involuntarily sterilized under eugenics-inspired laws. Politicians of all stripes championed these laws, which were widely embraced as a step toward "scientifically" engineering a better society. There were also plenty of critics of sterilization, and in time the laws were challenged on legal, moral, and medical grounds.

But those debates were quieted when the United States Supreme Court endorsed sexual surgery as an appropriate public health initiative, comparing it to vaccination, in a 1927 decision calledBuck v. Bell.

Within ten more years a total of thirty-two stateshad passed laws designed to end procreation among the mentally ill or "feebleminded," the poor and others considered "socially inadequate." Despite wide publicity before and after World War II for the massive eugenic sterilization program run by the Nazis, most U.S. state sterilization laws remained in force well into the 1970s.

Because of the Buck case and because Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia maintained a vigorous pace of surgery after World War II, many people associate eugenic sterilization with the south. That region has attracted attention recently since more people who endured the procedure there are still alive. But southern states generated less than a third of the operations done in the entire country. California alone accounted for nearly another third. Where did the other sterilizations occur?

This year is the centennial of eugenic sterilization laws in Michigan, Kansas, North Dakota, and Wisconsin -- laws that led to involuntary surgery on nearly 10,000 people. Those states and twenty one others, such as New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Delaware, Washington and Utah, operated on more than 20,000 people

Not one of those states has confronted the horror of their past policies and recognized their victims, and none of them has seriously debated the issue of compensation for a program that is now almost universally condemned.

For political leaders in a few states, reckoning with America's eugenics movement has been gradual. More than a decade ago, when Virginia became the first state to apologize for its role in the eugenics movement, six other states followed suit, including California.

Unique among all the states, North Carolina has seen continuous and repeated efforts by a legislator to compensate victims of sterilization before all of them had died. The presence of more victims with lucid memories still alive to tell their tragic stories on TV news and to the legislature there may have bolstered his push.

Other states, too, can consider compensating sterilization without incurring a huge burden. In California, an estimated 225 to 497 victims of 20th century sterilization were alive in 2012, according to a recent Santa Clara Law Review article that relied on mortality rates, demographic information, and other data.

Using a similar approach, we calculate about 1,900 people are alive nationwide who were sterilized under eugenic statutes. That averages approximately sixty living victims for each state with a sterilization law.

Why have states resisted redressing the evil inflicted under their own laws? Certainly some political leaders fear that reparations could set costly precedents for addressing other past injustices. Others may believe that those touched most by eugenics, the legions of poor and disabled at the bottom of America's social ladder, are not a voting constituency. But bad arithmetic and cynical political calculations are no excuse for inaction. This egregious injustice can be confronted directly: Its few surviving victims are identifiable. They do not cross the generations. Even in a time of belt tightening, the cost of compensation is affordable.

For states with a record of injustice administered under the banner of eugenics, it is too early to tell if North Carolina marks a turning point. But if state capitals don't act soon to identify and compensate eugenic sterilization victims, it will be too late, and those states will find a place of their own on history's list of unrepentant butchers.

Paul A. Lombardo is a professor of law at Georgia State University College of Law and author of Three Generations: No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell. Peter L. Hardin wrote about eugenics when he was Washington correspondent for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.


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