[Vision2020] Payments for Victims of Eugenics Are Shelved

[lfalen]

A good movie that deals with this is "After The Promise" staring Mark Harmon. It is very sad so I would not watch it when you are already depressed.

Roger

-----Original message-----
From: Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:33:27 -0700
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] Payments for Victims of Eugenics Are Shelved

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