Between 1929 and 1974, the North Carolina Eugenics Board sterilized thousands of men and women without their knowledge or consent, most of whom were poor, black, disabled, institutionalized, or undereducated. According to TPM, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 of them are still alive, and 146 of them have been found and verified. After years of working with victims to come up with an acceptable solution, the state’s House, led by Republican speaker Thom Tillis, proposed paying $50,000 to each of the living victims of the state’s foray into messing with the gene pool. A total of $10 million was set aside for currently known and to-be-discovered victims.
Upon reflection however, today’s Senate Republicans would rather not do that. After all, it was just sterilization.
Sen. Don East said, “I’m so sorry it happened, but throwing money don’t change it, don’t make it go away. It still happened.”
Sen. Austin Allrand “I’m not so sure it would lay the issue at rest because if you start compensating people who have been ‘victimized’ by past history, I don’t know where that would end.”
After all, these people were ‘feeble minded’ and illiterate guardians signed their X’s, so it was all legal.
Elaine Riddick Jessie is an African-American woman who, as a 14-year-old girl in 1968, was forcibly sterilized by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, which argued that she was “feebleminded” and “promiscuous.”
Prior to the sterilization (at age 13), Jessie had been kidnapped, molested, and raped.
The South rises again.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 
That sucks!
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UnREAL….
In AMERICA?
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Of course, we still pay American dollars to the families of civilians killed as collatoral damage in AfPak and Iraq –
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Unbelievible, that just shows you the mind set of the Republicans. Thanks for sharing this Moe.
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Very revealing, isn’t it Gordon. I just read around your place. . . what an undertaking! What a brave thing it is to follow a dream. Not too many people pull it off. I wish you great good fortune.
Meanwhile, thanks for coming by – hope to see you more often and I’ll follow your progress on the farm.
And welcome to the blogsphere!
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It was a sound a logical program based upon the science of the day. It was just morally reprehensible.
Yet, isn’t it based upon the same arguments that Planned Parenthood and the other abortionists use to this day?
Nancy Pelosi even had this to say about it in 2009:
Or you could go back to the abortionists “sainted” Margaret Sanger, who wrote:
Give up on this being a “Republican” thing. All societies have problems when it comes to the defectives, degenerates, and non-producing reproducing.
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Yet, isn’t it based upon the same arguments that Planned Parenthood and the other abortionists use to this day?
Nancy Pelosi even had this to say about it in 2009:
Perfect point jonolan. While it’s the republicans withholding the money this time,a point I disagree with them on, it’s the liberals that continue to support the same type of thinking through PP.
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Well, an abortion doesn’t prevent a person from having children for life…so not at all the same thing.
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Well, an abortion doesn’t prevent a person from having children for life
Well……
It depends on which person you’re talking about; the mother or the child.
And don’t forget, 50% of the people involved in abortion die, which is like WAY not the same thing as not dying.
So yeah, not at all the same thing.
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Huh? I have trouble believing 50% of the women die…our safety standards for medical procedures are a little better by now, aren’t they?
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Huh? I have trouble believing 50% of the women die…our safety standards for medical procedures are a little better by now, aren’t they?
Now I understand your argument better. You don’t think that the fetus is a life until actual and literal birth. I disagree with it, but now I know where you’re coming from.
So, do you object to double murder charges for drunk drivers that kill pregnant women?
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Actually, I do believe a fetus is a human later on in the pregnancy, just not in the first few months. I suppose then that I could think of the drunk driving charges as double murder if it happened in the later stages of pregnancy. But I doubt that the laws of our society really need to be that complicated, simply so they can be based on my own personal and complicated beliefs.
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Between 1929 and 1974, the North Carolina Eugenics Board sterilized thousands of men and women without their knowledge or consent, most of whom were poor, black, disabled, institutionalized, or undereducated.
This has made me sick from the very first I found out about this project in North Carolina.
Not so good days…..
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Ok, pino, why? It makes me a little sick too – and I know far too much about it due to one of my wives being the researcher for Edwin Black, who writes about eugenics – but I can’t for the life of me really understand why I’m so disgusted with the idea of preventative sterilization of those who we really don’t want – let’s be honest – to reproduce.
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Ok, pino, why?
I’m a pretty big individual liberty kinda guy. Kinda hard to make the case that folks should pay for their own food, cell phones and medical care while at the same time removing their ability to decide some pretty fundamental concepts.
But yes, I am struck by the case made in Freakonomics regarding the recent decrease in the crime rate. See, it turns out that criminals come from at risk mothers. And at risk mothers are self-interested individuals [like we all are] and so they maximize their conditions in life. So it’s not surprising that at risk women who become at risk mothers are awfully good at self selecting for abortion.
So….when more and more at risk mothers begin to have fewer and fewer kids, we end up with fewer kids of at risk mothers. And THAT means we are birthing and raising less criminals.
The criminals of 2000’s aren’t around because they were never born in the 70’s and 80’s.
Oddly, just like crazy aunt Nancy claims.
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I can’t for the life of me really understand why I’m so disgusted with the idea of preventative sterilization of those who we really don’t want – let’s be honest – to reproduce.
If ya want a really good read, check out “The Bell Curve.” Or
***Selfless plug alert***
Follow my posts on the same.
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eurobrat ,
” Well, an abortion doesn’t prevent a person from having children for life…so not at all the same thing. ”
If it were not such a horrible thing, your statement would be amazingly funny . Just how many aborted people have actually gone on to have children ?
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Since the fetuses being aborted had not yet become people…still not the same thing as denying the right to have children to an actual person. Does it matter if a person who never existed would have gone on to have children…?
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So when, O wise one possessed of the Gods’ knowledge, do they become people? What are the criteria for being people?
I seem to to remember that a while ago we didn’t think of Blacks as people either – and had all the science in the world at that time to backup our assertions.
It must be comforting to be able to blithely decide that the unborn aren’t people – or that anyone else isn’t people for that matter.
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@jonolan
At one point the fetus is not autonomous and requires the mother(symbiotic or parasitic relationship) to live. At another point it can live separate of its mother even though medical intervention is required(incubator and such). So at what point along this path do you say person?
Even the Bible has something to say about it, Leviticus 17:11. At least Grissom from CSI liked it enough to use it.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1515367/posts
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So then people requiring 24×7 life-support of some kind are no longer people with the rights of same? You might want to look at that logic again; it’s got some nasty twists to it which are only blocked by quite subjective, emotional, and arbitrary decision-making that has nothing to do with logic.
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I am not an expert at when the exact moment is that the fetus becomes a person. I draw the line at the first trimester, personally One thing I do know is that I *don’t* believe the fetus is a human being in the first stages of pregnancy, when it’s still just a clump of cells.
I am not the wise one possessed of the gods’ knowledge in this case–you are. You’re the one who feels that you can force your belief that life begins at conception onto everyone else. It must be nice to blithely command other people to live their lives as you wish them to, based on your theology/belief system.
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Nice try but a false argument, eurobrat.
My theology doesn’t have a problem with abortion. My logic and basic ethics do. Since I can’t tell when the unborn become people I choose to err on the side that doesn’t involve letting them be killed.
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I see enough pro-life people around me trying to take our abortion rights away that I know this concern about them trying to force their beliefs on me is not a “false argument”. Sadly, it’s a reality.
Since I don’t believe that the unborn is a person at the beginning of pregnancy, I don’t see that there is any killing there, on the ethical side of things. Obviously, we will disagree about this.
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You didnt answer my question. At what point do YOU say person??
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I say that, as I responded to eurobrat, that I DON’T KNOW and that nobody else does either. Hence I choose not side with those who wish to kill the unborn who are the only innocents in this world.
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@jonolan
I agree, we dont know and technically they are not in this world, yet.
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Eurobrat ,
So a fetus is kinda like a person on life support ? The woman carrying the worthless little bugger is a mobile ventilator\feeding tube. Abortion is really just prenatal euthanasia . It’s a convenience like fast food .
This is making me hungry for abortions in a jar, red beet eggs .
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Well, I don’t know if the fetus is like a person on life support to me, since until later on in the pregnancy, I don’t think the fetus is a person. And I’m sure you know that abortion can be a serious surgery, as well as a difficult decision, for the woman involved, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a convenience. I hate to say it, but comparing it to fast food is such male thinking….
But hey, I realize that “red beet egg” is far more sacred than anything I might intend to do with my life….
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You’re the one who feels that you can force your belief that life begins at conception onto everyone else.
I think an interesting point is that we agree we can’t know when lie begins. This implies that after that point in time, when life begins, we cease talking about non-life and are now discussing a human being. A life that is endowed with liberty.
I would argue that human life does not begin after the fertilized cell divides once. I would also argue that 1 minute before literal birth, the “thing” is a human being. Now, to our “we don’t know when life begins” point, we could walk back minute by minutes and get closer.
Is there human life TWO minutes after fertilization? No?
Is there human life TWO minutes before literal birth? Yes?
Then three, then four….
The big question is, would we still think abortion is okay after human life has been established?
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I can understand where you’re coming from with that perspective. My only objection is, just because we don’t know the exact point at which human life begins, does that mean that we throw up our hands and say that a woman is not allowed to terminate an unwanted pregnancy *ever*, not even after the cells have only divided a couple of times, when you say you don’t think it’s a life yet? It seems more reasonable to me that we use our best judgment and find a point of compromise somewhere in the early stages of pregnancy.
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Pino ,
It really does come down to a beauty contest . A fetus is better looking at 9 months than 2 months . At 2 months the kid is still ugly enough to be killed .
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I don’t think biology has very much to do with a beauty contest, or with looks. But you get points for humor, I guess.
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I looked up the Leviticus verse and it sounds to me like it’s about blood sacrifice and retribution for murder….???
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Actually, it’s about animal sacrifice as an atonement for sin.
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