LAT: Sterilized by North Carolina, she felt raped once more

[ellisonz]

Elaine Riddick, 57, listens as Dr. Laura Gerald, unseen, chairwoman of the Governor’s Eugenics Compensation Task Force, announces on Jan. 10 the panel's recommendation of a $50,000 payment to each victim. The meeting was held in Raleigh, N.C. (Shawn Rocco, Raleigh News & Observer / January 26, 2012)

Elaine Riddick was only 14 when the state decided that she was not capable of mothering children and quietly cauterized her fallopian tubes. The $50,000 now offered to her only makes her angrier.
By David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times
January 25, 2012, 4:25 p.m.
Reporting from Raleigh, N.C.—

Elaine Riddick was a confused and frightened 14-year-old. She was poor and black, the daughter of alcoholic parents in a segregated North Carolina town. And she was pregnant after being raped by a man from her neighborhood.

Riddick's miserable circumstances attracted the attention of social workers, who referred her case to the state's Eugenics Board. In an office building in Raleigh, five men met to consider her fate — among them the state health director and a lawyer from the attorney general's office.

Board members concluded that the girl was "feebleminded" and doomed to "promiscuity." They recommended sterilization. Riddick's illiterate grandmother, Maggie Woodard, known as "Miss Peaches," marked an "X" on a consent form.

Hours after Riddick gave birth to a son in Edenton, N.C., on March 5, 1968, a doctor sliced through her fallopian tubes and cauterized them.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-forced-sterilization-20120126,0,2398463.story

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

I wonder if they waited until all the guilty were dead. (the eugenics board members/doctors/social workers) I wouldn't doubt it.

But between 1960 and 1968, when Riddick was sterilized, twice as many blacks as whites were sterilized.

Riddick was 19 when she discovered, during a medical examination, what had happened to her. She was devastated, for she had always intended to have several children.

Outraged, she contacted the American Civil Liberties Union in North Carolina, which filed a lawsuit on her behalf in 1974.

In 1983, a jury ruled in favor of the defendants. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Riddick's appeal.

In 2010, North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue established the Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation

The board closed shop in 1977.


Justice delayed is (all too often) no justice at all.

[ellisonz]

2. That's certainly an interesting theory...

It would prevent potential civil if not criminal charges.

[Solly Mack]

3. I don't know words strong enough to express my anger.

Dollar amounts and the all too conveniently too late to do anything about it apology....that's all people ever get when governments commit atrocities.

[ellisonz]

4. One of the more horrific aspects of Jim Crow...

...I don't know if I were her if I could take the money. My grandparents do get reparations from the German government...but I definitely agree that it is a bitter pill to swallow.

[Solly Mack]

5. It is indeed.

[no_hypocrisy]

6. Government sterilization is still constitutional although not practiced.

Buck v. Bell was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1927. (Former President William H. Taft was Chief Justice).
The Court upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the unfit "for the protection and health of the state." Specifically, the Court upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the mentally retarded, "for the protection and health of the state." It was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics—the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool. This case has not been overturned and still has a constitutional imprimateur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

The plaintiff, Carrie Buck, was deemed feebleminded as well as her illegitimate daughter. Their only "defect" was being poor. It was later found that her daughter had an average to good intellect.

In that part of Virginia, these eugenic sterilizations took place in Lynchburg. Yes, Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg. "The Training School" was later transformed into an institution where "special education" children could receive training and programs for their challenges.

[nanabugg]

7. Eugenics brought to you by the "pro life" RW, evangelical cabal in the US.

Irony or just plain evil?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. I recall a news report from the 1970s ) about

two African-American sisters in Mississippi ages 12 and 14 who were sterilized after county officials used big words to convince their illiterate mother that they "needed an operation."