[Vision2020] Payments for Victims of Eugenics Are Shelved

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=8a907ae1/15fbc62a&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787507c_nyt5&ad=BEMH_120x60_May4_NoText&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fthebestexoticmarigoldhotel>

------------------------------
June 20, 2012
Payments for Victims of Eugenics Are Shelved By KIM
SEVERSON<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/kim_severson/index.html>

North Carolina’s novel effort to compensate people who were sterilized
under a widespread and decades-long eugenics program that stretched into
the 1970s all but died in the State Senate on Wednesday.

Despite backing from Gov. Bev Perdue and the State House of
Representatives, a compensation package that would have given victims up to
$50,000 each was not included in the Senate’s budget.

“I think there’s a very strong message from the Senate they’re not prepared
to take it up this year,” said Thom Tillis, a Republican and speaker of the
House, who supported paying victims.

Lawmakers will vote on the final $20.2 billion budget later this week and
then send it to the governor, but it is unlikely that any last-minute
changes will include the eugenics bill.

Victims and supporters<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/us/redress-weighed-for-forced-sterilizations-in-north-carolina.html?pagewanted=all>,
who had hoped North Carolina would be the first of 32 states that practiced
eugenics to pay victims, were angry.

“I am just overwhelmed that their mentality is still the same as the
politicians who supported eugenics in the first place,” said Elaine
Riddick, who was sterilized at 14 after having a baby fathered by a
neighbor. “You have done messed up people for life, and this is what you
do?”

The state said that Ms. Riddick was “feebleminded” and potentially
promiscuous. So her grandmother, who was illiterate and who feared Ms.
Riddick would be sent to an orphanage, signed the consent form with an X.

Ms. Riddick, who now lives in Atlanta, took a case against the state to the
United States Supreme Court in the ‘70s, but it declined to hear her
appeal. She is now working with a lawyer representing a group of victims
from other states to consider a class-action suit.

Certainly, fiscal concerns were a factor in the Senate’s decision. If all
of the 1,350 to 1,800 living victims came forward, the state could have
been liable for about $90 million. But the actual cost was expected to be
much less. So far, only 146 living victims have been verified, and an
additional 200 requests were pending. The House bill included $11 million
for the program.

Still, some senators argued that paying victims of what had been a legal
program could lead to paying descendants of slaves or American Indians.

“If we do something like this, you open up the door to other things the
state did in its history,” Senator Chris Carney, a Republican, told The
Mooresville Tribune<http://www2.mooresvilletribune.com/news/2012/jun/13/north-carolina-eugenics-bill-grey-mills-defends-hi-ar-2354987/>.
“And some, I’m sure you’d agree, are worse than this.”

North Carolina began sterilizing men and women in 1929 after social
workers, county health departments and eventually a state board deemed them
too poor, mentally disabled or otherwise unfit to raise children. The 7,600
victims of the program, which was dissolved in 1977, were largely women and
disproportionately members of minorities.

After years of pressure from victims, officials began offering public
apologies. In 2010, Ms. Perdue, a Democrat, established an office to track
living victims as a step toward compensating them.

Charmaine Fuller Cooper, executive director of the state’s Justice for
Sterilization Victims Foundation <http://www.sterilizationvictims.nc.gov/>,
became part counselor, part detective and part politician. She would try to
persuade people to share their medical and family histories so their cases
could be verified by state archivists and lawmakers and the public might be
moved by their stories.

On Wednesday, the state announced that it would begin to close the office
and no longer handle new requests from victims. However, people who believe
they or their family members were victims will be able to work with state
archivists.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120621/f5e9f7aa/attachment.html>