Racist Eugenics Exposed

Forced Sterilization in North Carolina

“Butchered. The doctor used that word.” This was how Elaine Riddick recalled being told by a New York doctor that she had been a victim of North Carolina’s forced sterilization program. In 1967, when she was just 13, Riddick had become pregnant after being raped by a neighbor. The five-person state Eugenics Board in Raleigh, North Carolina, declared this young black woman “feebleminded” and “promiscuous” and ordered her sterilized after she gave birth. “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach,” she said at a public hearing last summer. It was only after she was married and wanted more children, which she would never be able to have, that she found out what had been done to her. Riddick went on to college and later sued the state of North Carolina. Her case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear it.

North Carolina was one of over 30 states that adopted eugenics laws in the early part of the 20th century. Eugenics was popular with a layer of the ruling class in many capitalist countries, presenting a pseudoscientific rationale to stigmatize the poor for their own oppression. The movement reached its ultimate expression in the genocidal programs of Nazi Germany. In America, eugenicists’ notion of the “unfit” was a loosely applied euphemism for “poor white trash,” black people and immigrants, especially Catholics. The eugenics movement sought to pass laws implementing punitive measures against these “undesirables.” In North Carolina, a bastion of Jim Crow segregation, the eugenics movement was driven by wealthy capitalists including hosiery magnate James Hanes and the heirs to the Procter & Gamble and R.J. Reynolds fortunes.

The North Carolina Eugenics Board was disbanded in 1977, and the state’s law was finally repealed in 2003. A state task force has recently recommended to the legislature a paltry payment of $50,000 to each living victim of the Eugenics Board. To date, North Carolina is the only state to consider compensating the victims of forced sterilization. But out of some 2,000 victims estimated to still be alive, the state has formally recognized only 72 people—less than 1 percent of the 7,600 sterilized.

In the U.S., California and Virginia sterilized the most people, but no state had a campaign as far-reaching as North Carolina. Eugenics laws in other states specifically targeted those who were institutionalized or incarcerated. In North Carolina, the net was cast much wider, as the board took recommendations directly from social workers acting as snoops and moral authoritarians.

Charles Holt, now 62, had a state-ordered sterilization at the age of 19, after being committed to a state home for people with “mental and emotional problems.” His mother had been told by a social worker that sterilization would be in his interests in case he was wrongly accused of fathering a child. Like so many, he did not know what was done to him. As he told last summer’s hearing, “When I woke up I tried to walk, and I said: ‘This ain’t right. I don’t even remember them shaving me down there’.” These stories and more are detailed in official documents, easily available online, that are bone-chilling in their bureaucratic matter-of-factness.

Whereas in most states with sterilization laws the number of procedures decreased after the end of World War II, in North Carolina 70 percent of all the sterilizations took place after 1945. As the federal welfare program expanded in the 1950s, a racist neo-eugenics framework was established of the “deserving poor” vs. the “undeserving poor,” i.e., poor white widows as opposed to “lazy” black women. Railing that black birthrates were supposedly driving up welfare costs, legislators throughout the South drafted bills punishing welfare recipients who bore two or more “illegitimate” children with incarceration, sterilization, a fine or a combination of all three. Most of these bills were not enacted, but where there was pre-existing eugenics legislation, they were not necessary; in North Carolina, by 1966 blacks made up 64 percent of those sterilized.

Nial Ramirez, one victim who spoke out recently, repeated the threat made to her—as to so many others—by a social worker in the mid 1960s: “It’s either sign the paper or mama’s checks get cut off.” One of many children from a poor family, she was 18 at the time and had just given birth. The social worker coerced her to be sterilized, giving the false impression that the procedure was not permanent. This was the “war on poverty” North Carolina-style: reduce future welfare payments by punitively sterilizing the poor.

In Women and Revolution No. 4 (Fall 1973), its first issue as the journal of the Women’s Commission of the Spartacist League, we demanded “No forced sterilization” in the first point of our statement of program. In a later article, we wrote:

“While there are numerous examples of forced sterilizations of racial minorities within the U.S., it is important to make a distinction between voluntary birth control and government population-control schemes. The freedom to choose whether or not to have children and how many is an elementary democratic right. The fight for free contraceptives and free abortion on demand is an important part of the struggle for free quality medical care.”

—“Race, Sex, Class: Black Women Against Triple Oppression,” Women and Revolution No. 9, Summer 1975

Under the system of chattel slavery, black women were treated as “breeders” as they were the means of producing the next generation of slaves—property of the racist masters. Under increasingly decrepit capitalism, impoverished black women were specially targeted for sterilization as the capitalist masters have no future to offer their offspring, even the dwindling prospect of being wage slaves. To secure for black, poor and working women the basic right to control their own fertility will take a fundamental overturn of the capitalist economic system, breaking the power of the parasitic ruling class. Overcoming the poisonous racism and anti-woman prejudices and violence that permeate capitalist society requires socialist revolution to abolish this oppressive system once and for all.