Category Archives: Eugenics

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Posted: Aug 18, 2017 12:01 AM

Due to the rise of prenatal screening tests in Europe and the United States, the number of babies born with Down syndrome has begun to diminish significantly. And no one, as CBS News puts it, is "eradicating Down syndrome births" quite like Iceland.

Now, the word "eradication" typically implies that an ailment is being cured or beaten by some technological advancement. That's not so in this case. Nearly 100 percent of women who receive positive test results for Down syndrome in that small nation end up eradicating their pregnancy. Iceland averages only one or two Down syndrome children per year, and this seems mostly a result of parents receiving inaccurate test results.

It's just a matter of time until the rest of the world catches up. In the United States, an estimated 67 percent of women who find out their child will be born with Down syndrome opt to have an abortion. In the United Kingdom, it's 90 percent. More and more women are taking these prenatal tests, and the tests are becoming increasingly accurate.

For now, however, Iceland has completed one of the most successful eugenics programs in the contemporary world. If you think that's overstated, consider that eugenics -- the word itself derived from the Greek word meaning "well-born" -- is the effort to control breeding to increase desirable heritable characteristics within a population. This can be done through "positive selection," as in breeding the "right" kinds of people with each other, or "negative selection," which is stopping the wrong kinds of people from having children.

The latter was the hallmark of the progressive movement of the 1900s. It was the rationalization behind the coerced sterilization of thousands of the mentally ill, poor and minorities here in America. It is why Nazis required doctors to register all newborns born with Down syndrome, and why the first to be gassed were children under 3 years old with "serious hereditary diseases" like Down syndrome.

Down syndrome usually isn't hereditary. Most children born with it have moderate cognitive or intellectual disabilities, and many live full lives. But for many, these children are considered undesirable -- "inconvenient," really.

If Iceland's policy "reflects a relatively heavy-handed genetic counseling," as geneticist Kari Stefansson admits, then what will it mean when we have the science to extrapolate and pinpoint other problematic traits? How about children with congenital heart defects or cleft palates or sickle-cell disease or autism? Eradication?

One day, a DNA test will be able to tell us virtually anything we want to know, including our tendencies. So here's the best way to frame eradication policies in terms more people might care about: "Iceland has made great strides in eradicating gay births" or "Iceland has made great strides in eradicating low-IQ births" or "Iceland has made great strides in eradicating the birth of those who lean toward obesity" or "Iceland has made great strides in eradicating the birth of mixed-race babies." Feel free to insert the facet of humankind that gets you most upset.

How about "Iceland has made great strides in eradicating female births"? If your circumstance or inconvenience were a justifiable reason to eradicate a pregnancy, why wouldn't a sex-selective abortion be OK? Does the act of abortion transform into something less moral if we feel differently about it? Does the act change because it targets a group of people that we feel is being victimized? What is the ethical difference between a sex-selective abortion and plain-old abortion of a female?

One imagines that most women in Iceland who were carrying a baby with a genetic disorder did not opt to have an abortion because they harbor hate or revulsion toward children with Down syndrome. I assume they had other reasons, including the desire to give birth to a healthy child and avoid the complications that the alternative would pose.

A number of U.S. states have passed or want to pass laws that would ban abortions sought due to fetal genetic abnormalities, such as Down syndrome, or because of the race, sex or ethnicity of the fetus. One such U.S. House bill failed in 2012. Most Democrats involved claimed to be against sex-selective abortion, but not one gave a reason why. That's probably because once you admit that these theoretical choices equate to real-life consequences like eugenics, you are conceding that these are lives we're talking about, not blobs. In America, such talk is still frowned upon.

At one hospital in Iceland, "Helga Sol Olafsdottir counsels women who have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality," explains the CBS article. She says: "We don't look at abortion as a murder. We look at it as a thing that we ended." A thing? Using an ambiguous noun is a cowardly way to avoid the set of moral questions that pop up when you have to define that "thing." And science is making it increasingly difficult to circumvent that debate.

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Pro-Choicers Should Explain Why They Think Eugenics Is Acceptable - Townhall

Iceland has nearly achieved a shocking goal the country has eliminated almost 100 percent of children with Down syndrome.

They've aborted almost all of them.

CBS News reports it's due to widespread use of prenatal screening.

Even though most people born with Down syndrome live long, healthy lives, most pregnant women in Iceland choose to abort these babies. Only one or two babies with the disorder slip past the screening process each year.

Other countries are doing the same thing. Denmark has aborted 98 percent and the U.S. has aborted at least 67 percent of babies with this genetic disorder.

Wednesday, Christian evangelist Joni Eareckson Tada, who has been a quadriplegic in a wheelchair for 50 years following a diving accident, issued a statement saying, "Over 25 years ago when I served on the National Council on Disability, we responded vehemently against a report from the National Institutes on Health which listed abortion as a 'disability prevention strategy.' All 15 bi-partisan council members strongly advised the NIH to remove any reference which used abortion as a tactic in eliminating disability."

She added,"Each individual, no matter how significantly impaired, is an image-bearer of our Creator God. And people with Down syndrome are arguably some of the most contented and happy people on the planet. From them, we learn unconditional love and joyful acceptance of others who appear different. Now, even that is in jeopardy of being eradicated."

Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America also spoke out against the practice.

"Iceland sounds like they are proud of the fact that they've killed nearly all unborn babies that had an in-utero diagnosis of Down syndrome," Nance said. "This is not a medical advancement. This is eugenics and barbarianism at best." And Dr. James Dobson wrote, "I have rarely seen a story that so closely resembles Nazi-era eugenics as a recent report about Iceland 'eradicating' nearly 100 percent of Down syndrome births through abortion."

"We should all be deeply sorrowful and outraged. This practice is as equally inhumane as the views of the racist bigots who disgraced our country in Charlottesville this past weekend," he continued.

Pro-life actress Patricia Heaton is also weighing in.

"Iceland isn't actually eliminating Down Syndrome. They're just killing everybody that has it. Big difference," Heaton tweeted.

This high number of abortions in the U.S. and elsewhere are because of a simple, new blood test that detects Down syndrome. The test is non-invasive and can be performed early in pregnancy. Therefore, many, if not most, women have it.

Before today's non-invasive blood test, the test to determine whether an unborn child had Down syndrome, by comparison, was rarely performed. Called an amniocentesis, it was invasive and could have damaged, even killed, the baby. It was performed in the later stages of pregnancy and involved inserting a needle into the mother's placenta to extract amniotic fluid.

Today, the reason so many women choose to abort their Down syndrome babies is because they believe their child's life is not worth living. However,parents of Down syndrome childrensay that'snot true.

For example, whenCherry Jensengave birth to a Down syndrome baby, she recalls how her doctors vastly underestimated how high her daughter would function. Now Cherry uses her daughter's story to convince other women to keep their unborn Down syndrome children. There are many stories of people with Down syndrome who are successful inbusiness, sports and other endeavors, evenmodeling.

A coffee shop is Wilimington, North Carolina is giving people with Down Syndrome the chance to work. Check out the story here.

According to astudyof parents of children with Down syndrome:

According to astudyof people with Down syndrome over age 12:

7MYTHSabout people with Down syndrome:

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SHOCKING Eugenics in Iceland: Nearly All Babies with Down Syndrome Aborted - CBN News

In her book The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics And Feebleminded, poet Molly McCully Brown explores themes of disability, eugenics and faith. Kristin Teston/Persea hide caption

In her book The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics And Feebleminded, poet Molly McCully Brown explores themes of disability, eugenics and faith.

Growing up in southwestern Virginia in recent decades, poet Molly McCully Brown often passed by a state institution in Amherst County that was once known as the "Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded."

Since 1983 the facility, which was founded in 1910, has been called the Central Virginia Training Center, and it is now a residential home for people with various intellectual disabilities. But in the early 20th century, the place Brown now refers to as "the colony" was part of the eugenics movement taking hold in the U.S., and a variety of treatments now considered inhumane were practiced there including forced sterilization. Brown, who has cerebral palsy, notes that had she been born in an earlier era, she might have been sent to live at the institution herself.

"It is impossible to know that for sure," she says. "I can look at my life and look at my family and look at my parents and think, No, never. That never would have happened. But I also understand that if I had been born 50 years earlier, the climate was very different."

She hopes to give voice to those early generations of residents, in her book of poetry, The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics And Feebleminded.

For Brown, the themes of disability and poetry have been constant throughout her life: "In my life, there has always been my body in some state of falling apart or disrepair or attempting to be fixed, and there has always been poetry. And I couldn't untwine those things if I tried."

Interview Highlights

On seeing the buildings and grounds of the old facility

It was incredibly moving and incredibly powerful. The place is interesting because it is still an operational facility for adults with really serious disabilities, although it is in the process of closing. But like a lot of things in Virginia, it was initially built on an enormous amount of land. And, so, a really interesting thing happened, which is that as the buildings that were originally part of the colony fell into disrepair, they were largely just moved out of and new buildings were built on accompanying land, but those original buildings were not necessarily torn down. So the place itself is this really strange combination of functioning facility and ghost town of everything that it has been. I've never been in a place that felt more acutely haunted in my life.

On how some people assume her physical disability means she also has an intellectual disability

We do have a strange tendency in this country to equate any kind of disability with less intellectual capability and with even a less complete humanity. Certainly as a child and as a teenager and even now as an adult [I] encountered people who assumed that just because I used a wheelchair, maybe I couldn't even speak to them. I often get questions directed at people I'm with, as opposed to me, and that's a really interesting phenomenon.

On the connection between poetry and theology

Both poetry and theology for me are about paying attention to the world in a very intentional way, and about admitting a mystery that is bigger than anything that I rationally understand. ... I think poetry has always been for me a kind of prayer. So those things feel very linked for me. And, again, poetry does feel like the first and in some ways best language I ever had for mystery and for my sense of what exists beyond the world we're currently living in.

On how Catholicism has helped her accept her body

One of the things that I find so moving about Catholicism is that it never forgets that to be a person is inherently and inescapably and necessarily to be in a body a body that brings you pain, a body that brings you pleasure, a body that can be a barrier to thinking more completely about your life and your soul but [that it] can also be a vehicle to delivering you into better communion with the world, with other people and to whatever divinity it is that you believe in.

What Catholicism did for me, in part, is give me a framework in which to understand my body as not an accident or a punishment or a mistake, but as the body that I am meant to have and that is constitutive of so much of who I am and what I've done and what I hope I will do in the world.

More and more ... I've come to see my body as a place of pride and potential, and as something that gives me a unique outlook onto the world. And I'd rather that, I guess, than be infuriated by it.

On her twin sister, who died shortly after birth

She lived about 36 hours after we were born. ... It's a phenomenon in my life that I have not a lot of rational explanation for, ... but it is true that I miss my sister with a kind of intense specificity that has no rational explanation, and that I feel aware of her presence in this way that I can't exactly explain or articulate, but which feels undeniable to me. ...

I do think that that sort of gave me no other option than to believe in some kind of something beyond this current mortal life that we're living. Because what is the explanation otherwise for the fact that I feel like I miss and I know this person who only lived a matter of hours? And for the fact as much as I know that she is dead and is gone in a real way, she doesn't feel "disappeared" to me.

On how her physical disability and her poetry are intertwined

I think the easiest way I have of describing it is I have two [early] memories. ... One of them is of sitting on a table in a hospital room in the children's hospital in St. Louis, choosing the flavor of the anesthetic gas I was going to breathe when they put me under to do my first major surgery. I was picking between cherry and butterscotch and grape. And the second memory that I have is of my father reading a Robert Hayden poem called "Those Winter Sundays."

Roberta Shorrock and Therese Madden produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Deborah Franklin adapted it for the Web.

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Poet With Cerebral Palsy Speaks To Early Eugenics Movement - NPR - NPR

Due to the rise of prenatal screening tests, the number of babies born with Down syndrome in the Western world has begun to significantly diminish. And no one, as CBS News puts it, is eradicating Down syndrome births quite like the country of Iceland.

Now, the word eradication typically implies that an ailment is being cured or beaten by some technological advancement. Not so in this case. Nearly 100 percent of women who receive positive tests for Down syndrome in that small nation end up eradicating their pregnancies. Iceland averages only one or two Down syndrome children per year, and this seems mostly a result of parents receiving inaccurate test results.

Its just a matter of time until the rest of the world catches up. In the United States around 67 percent of women who find out their child will be born with Down syndrome opt to have an abortion. In the United Kingdom its around 90 percent. More and more women are taking these prenatal tests, and the tests are becoming increasingly accurate.

For now, however, Iceland has completed one of the most successful eugenics programs in the contemporary world.If you think thats overstated, consider that eugenics the word itself derived from Greek, meaning well born is nothing more than an effort to control breeding to increase desirable heritable characteristics within a population. This can be done through positive selection, as in breeding the right kinds of people with each other, or in negative selection, which is stopping the wrong kinds of people from having children.

The latter was the hallmark of the progressive movement of the 1900s. It was the rationalization behind the coerced sterilization of thousands of mentally ill, poor, and minorities here in America. It is why real-life Nazis required doctorsto register all newborns born with Down syndrome. And the first humans they gassed were children under three years old with serious hereditary diseases like Down syndrome.

Most often Down syndrome isnt hereditary, of course, but for many these children are considered undesirable really, they are considered inconvenient although most are born with moderate cognitive or intellectual disabilities and many live full lives.

If Icelands policy reflects a relatively heavy-handed genetic counseling, as geneticist Kari Stefansson admits in a video, then what will it mean when we have the science to extrapolate on these tests and pinpoint other problematic traits in people? How about children with congenital heart defects or cleft palates or sickle-cell disease or autism? Eradicate?

One day a DNA test will be able to tell us virtually anything we want to know, including our tendencies. So heres the best way to frame the ugliness of these eradication policies in terms more people might care about: Iceland has made great strides in eradicating gay births or Iceland has made great strides in eradicating low-IQ births or Iceland has made great strides in eradicating births of those who lean towards obesity or Iceland has made great strides in eradicating births of mixed-race babies. Feel free to insert the fact of humankind that gets you most upset.

How about, Iceland has made great strides in eradicating female births?

From what I could tell admittedly, this is through social media; I see no polling on the issue most people, many liberals included, reacted to Icelands selective eradication of Down syndrome children negatively. Polling from the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institutehas found that 77 percent believed abortion should be illegal if the sole reason for seeking an abortion was to have a boy or girl.

I dont understand why.If your circumstance or inconvenience is a justifiable reason to eradicate a pregnancy who wants to be punished with a baby, after all? why wouldnt a sex-selective abortion be okay? Does the act of abortion transform into something less moral if we feel differently about it? Does the act change because it targets a group of people that we feel are being victimized? What is the ethical difference between a sex-selective abortion and plain-old abortion of a girl?

One imagines that most women carrying babies with genetic disorders in Iceland did not opt to have abortions because they harbor hate or revulsion towards Down syndrome children. I assume they had other reasons, including the desire to give birth to a healthy child and avoid the complications that the alternative would pose.

A number of U.S. states have passed or want to pass laws that would ban abortions sought due to fetal genetic abnormalities, such as Down syndrome, or because of the race, sex, or ethnicity of a fetus. Such a U.S. House bill failed in 2012. Most Democrats involved claimed to be against sex-selective abortion, but not one gave a reason why. Probably because once you admit that these theoretical choices equate to real-life consequences, like eugenics, you are conceding that these are lives were talking about, not blobs. In America, such talk is still frowned upon.

Icelanders, apparently, are more honest:

Over at Landspitali University Hospital, Helga Sol Olafsdottir counsels women who have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality. They speak to her when deciding whether to continue or end their pregnancies. Olafsdottir tells women who are wrestling with the decision or feelings of guilt: This is your life you have the right to choose how your life will look like.

Well, not everyone gets to choose what his or her life looks like. Certainly not those who are eradicated because they suffer from genetic disorders.Then again, We dont look at abortion as a murder, Olafsdottir explains later. We look at it as a thing that we ended. A thing? Using an ambiguous noun is a cowardly way to avoid the set of moral questions that pop up when you have to define that thing. And science is making it increasingly difficult to circumvent that debate.

More:

Pro-Choicers Should Explain Why They Think Eugenics Is Acceptable - The Federalist

Last night, CBS News took a break from hyperventilating about the looming Nazi menace to spend a few minutes exploring the benefits of eugenics.

And heres how CBS frames it:

Should the rest of the world follow suit? I thought we answered that question in 1945.

As a lot of people have pointed out, this isnt eliminating Down Syndrome. Its killing people who have an unpreventable genetic abnormality. Its eugenics.

If youre an abortion enthusiast oh, sorry, if you support abortion rights you have no problem with this. You believe that some lives matter more than others. You believe that the difference between a fetus and a baby is up to the mother. You might even believe that its okay to kill a baby because it doesnt have a future because youre killing it.

You believe that a person with problems you dont have, and that youd rather not deal with, isnt really a person.

So why not? After all, youre only ending a pregnancy with an abnormality. Its not as if were talking about a human being.

If you want more liberty and lower taxes and the freedom to say so, youre a Nazi. But not if you want to wipe out the untermenschen to bring about a glorious, genetically perfect future. Thats where we are now.

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CBS News Asks: Is Eugenics Right For You? - The Daily Caller

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Written by Brent Derider

On May 15th 2017 at 2:05PM, Sessions Judge Sam Benningfield signed a standing order that, effectively, puts White County, TN, in the business of trading sterilization for freedom. It stated that any inmate who completes a neonatal health class has an option to have their jail time reduced. Female inmates can get a Nexplanon birth control implant in their arm and male inmates are subjected to a vasectomy. For this, they receive 30 days credit toward their sentence.

Proponents of the order tout the program as relieving the burden on taxpayers and the welfare system and deny accusations of coercive eugenics, claiming that the program is voluntary. Says former S.C. Republican Congressional hopeful, Kris Wampler, Right now, we pay people to have kids by offering them welfare. We are literally subsidizing the birth of countless kids no one will care for. Doesnt it make more sense, if were going to pay someone anyway, to pay them to be less of a burden on society?

Judge Benningfield claims the order will give them a chance when they get out to not be burdened with children.

It seems, however, that not everyone is quite so thrilled with White Countys new involvement in eugenics. District Attorney Bryant Dunaway opposes the order. Those decisions are personal in nature, and I think thats just something the court should neither encourage nor mandate. said Dunaway. The White County DA further remarks I instructed my staff not to be involved in this type of arrangement in any way.

Thomas C. Arnold Jr., respected liberty advocate and LPTN Chair, spoke clearly against the action. It is a heinous attack on civil liberties in Tennessee. No individual, regardless the crime, should be coerced in this manner. It sickens me.

Most inmates are a product of the failed war on drugs and shouldnt be incarcerated at all, but even actual criminals have the right to their ability procreate. Forcing people to choose between sterilization and their freedom isnt an offer. Its coercion. If a person can be released into society, safely, they should be. Sterilization has no role to play. This goes far beyond government over-step. This is a great stride down a dark road that leads us directly back to 1940s Germany.

As far as this activist is concerned, enough is enough. A clear message needs to be sent to Judge Benningfield and those like him. As both a Libertarian and a proud southerner, I am appalled at this clear attempt to target the reproductive ability of a class of people that Mr. Benningfield finds unappealing. This is not within the scope of legitimate government. This is coerced eugenics and stopping it is the duty of every one of us.

To contact Sam Benningfield and share your thoughts on this abuse of power:

111 Depot Street, Suite 2, Sparta, TN 38583

Phone & Fax: 931-836-3600

eugenicsprisonSterilization

Excerpt from:

Eugenics in Tennessee: Trading Sterilization for Freedom - The Libertarian Republic

One small step for medicine, one giant leap for eugenics MercatorNet (blog) On August 2 scientists published the results of the first experiments conducted on human embryos using the gene editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 in the United States [1]. These experiments have shown greater efficacy in editing embryos than previous attempts.

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One small step for medicine, one giant leap for eugenics - MercatorNet (blog)

Jewish Chronicle

Montreal to rename street honouring doctor who supported Nazi eugenics policy Jewish Chronicle Montreal to rename street honouring doctor who supported Nazi eugenics policy. Alexis Carrel, the French Nobel Prize-winning scientist, backed the Vichy regime which collaborated with the Third Reich. Montreal is going ahead with plans to remove any ...

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Montreal to rename street honouring doctor who supported Nazi eugenics policy - Jewish Chronicle

09 August 2017 | by Sam Adams , Sarah Mac Donald 'This aim is the essence of eugenics: not to make people better but to make better people'

Gene-editing experiments conducted on purposely-created human embryos are the essence of eugenics, a leading Catholic expert in bioethics has warned.

Scientists in the United States have published the results of tests carried out on embryos using the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9, with the aim of preventing the inheritance of genetic disease.

The experiments, held at Oregon Health and Science University, and published in the science journal Nature on 2 August, involved CRISPR/Cas9 being used to remove a mutation that causes sudden heart failure.

As part of the process, healthy women were paid to undergo ovarian stimulation to produce eggs which were then fertilised and experimented upon before being destroyed.

Dr Albert Jones, director of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, in Oxford, said the process raised serious ethical concerns, in particular, the creation of embryonic human beingspurely for their use as experimental subjects.

The embryo is conceived with the intention that it will be modified, said Dr Jones. This aim is the essence of eugenics: not to make people better but to make better people.

Dr Jones also questioned the ethics of encouraging women by financial inducements to part with their reproductive potential, and warned of the short term risks of ovarian stimulation.

Ethical concerns were also raised by Bishop Kevin Doran, chair of the Irish Bishops Consultative Group on Bioethics, who warned: you cant destroy one human being in the hope of saving another.

In an interview with RTEs Sean ORourke programme, the Bishop of Elphin said the Church was very clear that medical intervention on human embryos is permitted provided it is without undue risk to the embryo and provided that it is directed towards the improvement of the embryos health.

However, in the case of this new research he said, we are talking about a whole group of human individuals whose lives are being used purely and simply for research.

Professor John Haldane, J. Newton Rayzor Sr Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University, Texas, said the discovery of the process and development of CRISPR is a remarkable scientific achievement but that its application to human embryos may involve serious risks.

There is the danger that producing improved or enhanced human beings changes the relations between us, increasing inequalities of opportunity and outcome and encouraging stigmatisation, he said.

The processes involved may themselves be unethical insofar as they involve creating and destroying human life.

PICTURE: Embryos are placed onto a CryoLeaf ready for instant freezing using the new vitrification process

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Genetic breakthrough 'will promote eugenics', warns Catholic expert in bioethics - The Tablet

Last month, headlines about a judge in Tennessee who offers criminals reduced sentences if they agree to be get vasectomies or take long-term birth controlshocked the nation. The scrutiny didn't elicit any remorse from the judge, who argues sterilization can combat the rise of drug-addicted newborns. But it did cause the health department to effectively end the program.

The news was a flashback to America's long history of forced eugenic sterilizations.

In the 20th century, state governments deemed 60,000 Americans -- mostlyprisoners, the mentally ill and poor people -- unfit to reproduce and forced them to undergo mandatory sterilization. Almost half of the controversial medical procedures occurred in just three states: California, North Carolina and Virginia.

North Carolina and Virginia have since passed laws to compensate the surviving victims of their eugenics programs, but the same can't be said of California, which forcibly or coercively sterilized more people than any other U.S. state. From the time the states eugenics law was passed in 1909 to the day it was repealed 70 years later, California sterilized about 20,000 people.

In 2003, former California Gov. Gray Davis issued a formal apology to victims of forced sterilization, saying"it was a sad and regrettable chapter ... one that must never be repeated." Yet a decade later, theCenter for Investigative Reportingrevealed that California had been sterilizing prisoners without proper consent as recently as 2010 -- some of whom claimed to be coerced into it by prison staffers.

One lawmaker in the state wants to finally make amends.

Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia plans to introduce a reparationsbill in 2018 that would likely provide victims with somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000, comparable to what North Carolina and Virginia respectively offered. The reparations, however, would not be extended to the women who were sterilized in state prisons as a punitive measure.

Garcia (one of only 10 Latina members of the California Assembly) felt drawn to the issue immediately, especially when she learned that Latina women made up a disproportionate number of the victims, suffering this fate at 2.65 times the rate of other women. To her surprise, one of the institutions that performed these surgeries was located in Norwalk, a city in her district.

I wanted to show my neighbors that this happened in our own backyard, says Garcia. This isnt far-fetched or far away.

If the bill is passed quickly, as many as 600 victims of the sterilization program could still be living, according to Alexandra Minna Stern, a historian and researcher at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about the states history of sterilization. (Stern is working with Garcia and others to draft the legislation.)

But victims could be difficult to find.

Most of them are likely approaching their late 80s, and since Davis apology in 2003, only one victim --a man living out of his car -- has ever come forward. For that reason, Stern says, a successful bill in California must allocate resources to locating living victims.

Stern has been pressing for reparations from the state since 2007, when she stumbled upon sterilization recommendation forms for nearly 20,000 patients tucked away in a filing cabinet in the state's mental health department. All of the patients listed were sterilized in California state hospitals from 1919 to 1952, some as young as 7 years old. The records provided proof.

So what's taken California -- arguably the most progressive state in the nation -- so long to right its historical wrongs?

One reason could be the seeming absence of any victims in California willing or able to come forward. In North Carolina and Virginia, Stern says dozens of victims began drumming up media attention, creating political pressure for a bill.

Whats more, most of Californias sterilizations happened earlier in the century, dropping off significantly in the 1950s. In North Carolina, sterilizations actually increased during this period, which means the number of living victims in that state is rather large.

Garcia, for her part, speculates that it has to do with political representation.

I think it partly has to do with the demographics of our legislature. This is an issue that has affected women and women of color, she says. We legislate from experience. So when we dont have diversity in the legislature, theres a real limitation in what were legislating on.

Stern says she's happy Garcia and other legislators are finally working on this bill, and she believes the money can make a great deal of difference for victims, many of whom are likely living in poverty.

But the bill won't help all sterilization victims.

What were talking about [with this bill] is officially recorded sterilization, people that are on a list and all their names can be found, says Stern. But what that means is that people who cant check all those boxes might not qualify for compensation. What about people who might have been sterilized at the same clinic by the same doctor, but it wasnt ordered by the sterilization board?

This has already proven to be a problem in North Carolina, where many victims don't qualifyforreparations because they were sterilized by the order of local judges who didn't receive approval from the State Eugenics Board.

Garcia is aware of the bill's shortcomings. But to her, some progress is better than none.

This [bill] definitely doesnt get justice for everyone out there, says Garcia. Its about elevating the discussion and then eventually building on it.

Excerpt from:

California Sterilized More People Than Any US State But Has Yet to Compensate Victims - Governing