August 24, 2011 - Mecklenburg County was particularly active in the North Carolina Eugenics program. During the busiest years, it had three times more sterilizations than the next highest county - Guilford, which was nearly the same size population-wise.
What was happening in Mecklenburg County at that time? Were people here that much more obsessed with sterilization?
That answer is complicated.
The North Carolina Eugenics Board didn't drive around town plucking people off the street to be sterilized. Its five members were state bureaucrats who did their work in a conference room in Raleigh. They rarely met the people they were sending to the cold steel of a doctor's table.
Middlemen did the leg work, picking candidates and summarizing their lives into terse paragraphs with just enough unsavory detail to convince the board. Take this one for a 23-year old single mother:
"Patient shows very poor judgment, talks and laughs inappropriately, emotionally unstable and irritable."
Another one for a 12-year-old girl says she is "often away from home for hours," "constantly talks about boyfriends," and "displays dime store rings" they give her. read more>>>
At bottom of this part there's a link to further information, you can also listen to this NPR report at site page above.
No comments:
Post a Comment