Eugenics and Forced Sterilization
Clarence Gamble and James Hanes were founding members of the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947. The League was tied to forced sterilization programs that saw both men and women, mostly poor, of low IQ, and predominantly minority extraction, undergo surgical sterilization without consent, with the goal being to reduce the state's welfare burden and improve the gene pool. The program ended in 1977; the state government apologized publicly in 2002. Governor Bev Perdue is advocating for financial restitution to be made to 7,600 victims.
Read more about this topic: Clarence Gamble
Famous quotes containing the word forced:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)