California To Pay Victims of Forced, Coerced Sterilizations
Source: AP News
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)- California is poised to approve reparations of up to $25,000 to some of the thousands of people- some as young as 13- who were sterilized decades ago because the government deemed them unfit to have children.
The payments will make California at least the third state- following Virginia and North Carolina- to compensate victims of the so-called eugenics movement that peaked in the 1930s. Supporters of the movement believed sterilizing people with mental illnesses, physical disabilities and other traits they deemed undesirable would improve the human race.
While California sterilized more than 20,000 people before its law was repealed in 1979, only a few hundred are still alive. The state has set aside $7.5 million for the reparations program, part of its $262.6 billion operating budget that is awaiting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. California’s forced sterilization program started in 1909, following similar laws in Indiana and Washington.
It was by far the largest program, accounting for about a third of everyone sterilized in the United States under those laws. California’s law was so prominent that it inspired similar practices in Nazi Germany, according to Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia State University and an expert on the eugenics movement...
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/california-business-science-health-government-and-politics-bb019f426cdbb839790ac98d420a0224
- Stacy Cordova, whose aunt was a victim of California's forced sterilization program that began in 1909, stands for a photo, July 5, 2021, in Azusa, Calif. Cordova's aunt, Mary Franco, was sterilized when she was 13 in 1934. Franco has since died, but Cordova has been advocating for reparations on her behalf.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Another one they don't teach in history books.
'Unwanted Sterilization & Eugenics Programs In The US, PBS, Independent Lens,' 2016.
Coerced sterilization is a shameful part of America’s history, and one doesn’t have to go too far back to find examples of it. Used as a means of controlling “undesirable” populations – immigrants, people of color, poor people, unmarried mothers, the disabled, the mentally ill – federally-funded sterilization programs took place in 32 states throughout the 20th century. Driven by prejudiced notions of science and social control, these programs informed policies on immigration and segregation.
As historian William Deverell explains in a piece discussing the “Asexualization Acts” that led to the sterilization of more than 20,000 California men and women, “If you are sterilizing someone, you are saying, if not to them directly, ‘Your possible progeny are inassimilable, and we choose not to deal with that.’” According to Andrea Estrada at UC Santa Barbara, forced sterilization was particularly rampant in California (the state’s eugenics program even inspired the Nazis): Beginning in 1909 and continuing for 70 years, California led the country in the number of sterilization procedures performed on men and women, often without their full knowledge and consent. Approximately 20,000 sterilizations took place in state institutions, comprising one-third of the total number performed in the 32 states where such action was legal. (from The UC Santa Barbara Current)
—
“There is today one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.” (from The L.A. Times) Researcher Alex Stern, author of the new book Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in America, adds: "In the early 20th century across the country, medical superintendents, legislators, and social reformers affiliated with an emerging eugenics movement joined forces to put sterilization laws on the books.
Such legislation was motivated by crude theories of human heredity that posited the wholesale inheritance of traits associated with a panoply of feared conditions such as criminality, feeblemindedness, and sexual deviance. Many sterilization advocates viewed reproductive surgery as a necessary public health intervention that would protect society from deleterious genes and the social and economic costs of managing ‘degenerate stock’.” Eugenics was a commonly accepted means of protecting society from the offspring (and therefore equally suspect) of those individuals deemed inferior or dangerous – the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, criminals, and people of color...
- Eugenical Sterilization Map of the United States, 1935; from The Harry H. Laughlin Papers, Truman State University.
- READ MORE,
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/
_____
History News Network, The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics, 2003
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796
_____
'Eugenic Nation,' By Alex Stern, white nationalism & ethnostate, 2020,
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2020/03/understanding-contemporary-white-nationalism-proud-boys-and-the-white-ethnostate%EF%BB%BF/
- Interview with Willis Lynch, part 1. (Olympia Stone, the New New South.) Lynch, born in 1933 was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years ago, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children.
http://blog.longreads.com/2014/11/19/...
