Lewis Reynolds, left, was sterilized at what is now known as the Central Virginia Training Center in Madison Heights, Va., when he was a teenager. Sarah Wiley, right, was sterilized at the same facility when she was 23.

'Everybody Wants a Family'

LYNCHBURG, Va. - Sarah Wiley still remembers some details of the medical procedure she had half a century ago: being taken to the operating room on a stretcher, the administration of ether as an anesthetic and a skeleton in the room that potentially served as a reference tool at the Lynchburg Training School and Hospital in Virginia.

But while other aspects of the operation may remain murky, its results have left a lasting impression on her body and mind.

"I was sad, I didn't like it," says Wiley, now 77. "They told me that I could never have kids."

Wiley was one of between 7,000 and 8,300 people sterilized with Virginia's blessing from the early 20th century until about 1980. At least 60,000 people in roughly 30 U.S. states were sterilized during the same time period, the result of a movement that in part aimed to weed out criminal behavior but also encompassed an even more sinister goal.

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Many of the operations occurred under the umbrella of eugenics, the idea that the human population can be improved through selective reproduction. Those put under the knife to prevent the passing on of potentially harmful hereditary traits often were deemed mentally disabled or "feebleminded" and subsequently, a financial drain on society.

"The change that occurred in this country that allowed sterilization to go on was really less about understanding how the genetics of heredity works and much more about trying to cut down on the number of people who were on welfare who were having babies," says Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia State University who has written extensively on the American eugenics movement.

Now, more than 50 years after Wiley's operation, two Virginia lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle are pushing a bill that would make the state the second in the U.S. to offer restitution to those sterilized under the authority of state law and a U.S. Supreme Court decision that lent constitutional credence to the practice.

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