HAMPTON ROADS, Va. Lewis Reynolds didnt know what had been done to him until years later.

After getting married, the Lynchburg man found he couldnt father children. The reason: He had been sterilized at age 13 under a Virginia law with the stated purpose of preventing defective persons from becoming by the propagation of their kind a menace to society.

Unable to have a family, his wife left him.

Reynolds, now 85, journeyed to Richmond this week in support of the Justice for Victims of Sterilization Act (HB1529), which would pay $50,000 each to survivingVirginians who were involuntarily sterilized between 1924 and 1979 under the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act.Eugenics was the now-discredited movement that sought to improve the genetic composition of humankind by limiting the reproduction of those deemed its less desirable members.

The Virginia law became a model for similar legislation passed around the country and the world, including Nazi Germany.The law was upheld in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the majority, famously declared: Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The Virginia sterilizations, more than 7,000 of them, were performed at six state institutions, including what is now known as Central Virginia Training Center in Lynchburg. When Reynolds was sterilized, it was called the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feeble Minded.

Reynolds was presumed to have epilepsy. As it turned out, he was exhibiting temporary symptoms from having been hit in the head with a rock.

Reynolds married again, and this time the union lasted. His second wife, Delores, died five years ago.

We had a good marriage for 47 years, he said in an interview.

But he has always regretted being unable to father children.

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Va. eugenics program victims closer to payment