Comments on: NC Panel Recommends Reparations for Victims of Forcible Sterilization

By: Endless surfing « fourthrow

Endless surfing « fourthrow — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:37:19 +0000

[...] NC Panel Recommends Reparations for Victims of Forcible SterilizationA state House panel recommended… [...]

By: Five Links That Are Actually Important, 1/1/09 « Our Descent Into Madness

Five Links That Are Actually Important, 1/1/09 « Our Descent Into Madness — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:12:49 +0000

[...] Panel recommends reparations for people forcibly sterilized under state eugenics programs. Horrifyingly, North Carolina only ceased these sterilizations in the 1970s. This is the first time [...]

By: Bitter Scribe

Bitter Scribe — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 02:16:42 +0000

ONE-THIRD of Puerto Rico women were sterilized in the 1960s?

OMFG.

Columbus and his minions, IIRC, wiped out an indigenous race on Puerto Rico, through slaughter and disease, so thoroughly that no trace of them remains. I guess we were going for Round 2.

By: posey

posey — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:27:50 +0000

I wish the US Government offer reparations to all the Puerto Rican Women who they sterilized over the years. I am not even sure many people are aware of the massive sterilization that occur in Puerto Rico.
…There are a number of examples in post Civil War America of eugenic programs but none as effective and widespread as the mass female sterilization in Puerto Rico. Beginning in the years following WW I, a program was initiated by the United States government, the medical community and the local government of Puerto Rico, to name a few, which resulted in the unprecedented sterilization of 1/3 of the female population by 1965, and the continued use of sterilization on a broad scale by Puerto Rican women as a form of birth control (Presser 1980)…

By 1980, Puerto Rico had the HIGHEST incidence of female sterilization in the world.

By: Rosalux

Rosalux — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:36:34 +0000

I think the best part of any discussion of reparations is that it puts into the public record and consciousness that these practices existed.

I have run into more people who simply do not believe forced sterilizations ever occurred, or if they did that they were all over the country, or that even if they were done all over the country it was a race or class issue and not “just” eugenics against people with mental retardation.

By: Kristin

Kristin — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:42:06 +0000

MomTFH: Yeah, this is a huge trend all over the sciences right now. This is why critical science studies are so important right now.

By: jonk

jonk — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 14:25:50 +0000

The history of ~~forced sterilizations~~ eugenics is one that’s highly important to modern understandings of mass schooling

By: Cinnamon

Cinnamon — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:15:25 +0000

Yay for Illinois. Oy! I’d heard this but had forgotten. Thanks for the reminder. And while I’m sure poor black women were affected by this, it was primarily targeted at poor Irish, Italian, and Eastern European women who were mostly immigrants. Poor and undesirable were the binding characteristics, didn’t matter your skin color, as much as it did your income level.

By: Bitter Scribe

Bitter Scribe — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 05:57:23 +0000

Illinois was the first state to offer a eugenics program in 1907 as social reformers advocated for a way to cleanse society of the mentally handicapped and mentally ill.

Yay! Another milestone for my state!

Not only are we tops in high-level corruption, we also took the lead in atrocities perpetrated on poor black women. Who’da thunk it?

By: MomTFH

MomTFH — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 03:31:00 +0000

This is very important, symbolically. I don’t think this possibility is a figment of another era. I am in medical school. In a journal club meeting, a student said that he thought poor women should be “sterilized for their own good”. I have also heard other future doctors say that people should be given IQ tests before they are allowed to have children.