Michigan sterilized more than 3,000 people from early 1900s to 1970s

digme

Michigan was among the 35 states that allowed sterilization of people considered unfit to reproduce.

So the Americans did this before the Germans lol
Can we call them evil now too?

michigan_sterilized

Bloody Nipples

This is a well known fact that this happened. How is this a conspiracy theory?

digme

I was afraid of getting called a "revisionist".......

humanji

Bloody Nipples wrote: »

This is a well known fact that this happened. How is this a conspiracy theory?

It's a conspiracy theory which was proven true.

Jeboa Safari

digme wrote: »

Michigan was among the 35 states that allowed sterilization of people considered unfit to reproduce.

So the Americans did this before the Germans lol
Can we call them evil now too?

michigan_sterilized

It's not a secret, BBC had a good article on it a while back:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13700490

More than 60,000 Americans were sterilised, many against their will, as part of a eugenics movement that finished in 1979, aimed at keeping the poor and mentally ill from having children. Now, decades on, one state is considering compensation.

In 1968, Elaine Riddick was raped by a neighbour who threatened to kill her if she told what happened.

She was 13, the daughter of violent and abusive parents in the desperately poor country town of Winfall, in the US state of North Carolina.

While she was in hospital giving birth, the state violated her a second time, she says.

A social worker who had deemed her "feeble-minded" petitioned the state Eugenics Board to have her sterilised.

Officials coerced her illiterate grandmother into signing an "x" on an authorisation form. After performing a Caesarean section, doctors sterilised her "just like cutting a hog", she says.

"They killed my kids," Ms Riddick says. "They killed mine before they got to me. They stopped it."

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Sterilisation in the UK and Europe

While eugenics is now recognised as a pseudoscience - and after the Nazis, one with murderous consequences - it was once a respectable branch of the social sciences.

The term 'eugenics', meaning "good birth", was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist who pushed the University College London to found a department to study the field.

Sir Winston Churchill once called for forced sterilisation of "the feeble-minded and insane classes".

While eugenic sterilisation never became official policy in the UK - in part due to opposition from the Catholic church - Finland, Norway, and Sweden adopted the sterilisation laws in the 1930s.

Between 1933 and 1945, more than 400,000 Germans were sterilised under Nazi "racial hygiene" laws, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Nearly four decades after the last person was sterilised under North Carolina's eugenics programme, a state task force is seeking the 2,900 victims of sterilisation officials estimate are still alive.

The group hopes to gather their stories and ultimately to recommend the state award them restitution. But with public coffers under severe pressure amid a flagging recovery, it is not clear the legislature will agree.

"I know I can't make it right but at least I can address it," said North Carolina state legislator Larry Womble. He hopes "to let the world know what a horrendous thing the government has perpetrated on these young boys and girls".

America's sterilisation movement was part of a broad effort to cleanse the country's population of characteristics and social groups deemed unwanted, an effort that included anti-race mixing and strict immigration quotas aimed at Eastern Europeans, Jews and Italians.

Beginning with Indiana in 1907, 32 states eventually passed laws allowing authorities to order the sterilisation of people deemed unfit to breed. The last programme ended in 1979.

The victims were criminals and juvenile delinquents, women deemed sexual deviants, homosexual men, poor people on welfare, people who were mentally ill or suffered from epilepsy. African Americans and Hispanic Americans were disproportionately targeted in some states.

'Coerced'
"In general it was the dispossessed of society," said Paul Lombardo, a historian and legal scholar at Georgia State University and editor of A Century of Eugenics in America.

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Sterilisation petitions

An 18-year-old girl, separated from her husband who had "manifested anti-social behaviour"
A black 25-year-old rape victim who showed "abnormal sexual tendencies"
A 16-year-old girl who had earlier been committed to a state institution for "sexual delinquency" and whose aunt "signed consent"
A white married mother of three, whose family had been "finally dependent for many years" and has "a history of inter-marriage with Indian and Negro"
A 15-year girl deemed "feebleminded"; parents reportedly consented
North Carolina Eugenics Board, 25 October 1950

The laws were plainly coercive, scholars say, though some incorporated a veneer of consent - illiterate farmhands given forms to sign, institutional inmates told they would not be released with their bodies intact, poor parents told they would be denied public assistance if they did not approve the removal of a wayward daughter's fallopian tubes.

Motivating the laws, Prof Lombardo said, was indignation at the thought that people who had violated sexual mores would subsequently end up needing public assistance.

"We have in this country have always been extremely sensitive to notions of public stories of inappropriate sexuality," he said.

"We exercise that most dramatically when it comes to times in which we think we're spending individual tax money to support people who violate those social norms. It's our puritanical background, running up against our sense of individualism."

Supreme Court approval
The racial context was inescapable as well.

"The fewer black babies we have the better, that's what some people said," Prof Lombardo said. "'They're just going to end up on welfare.'"


The state eugenics board issued orders to sterilise poor North Carolinians with bureaucratic efficiency
Also implicated in American sterilisation laws was the classical eugenic notion that as with horses, authorities could use genetic principles to improve society through selective breeding.

In a 1927 US Supreme Court decision that upheld the laws, storied jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."

All told, scholars estimate more than 60,000 Americans were sterilised under eugenics laws in the 20th Century.

North Carolina's law stood out for the wide net it cast.

Telling their stories
Most states would only order sterilisation of institutional inmates or patients, North Carolina's allowed for people within the community - typically social workers - to petition the state to have someone sterilised.


Rep Womble says the eugenics programme "borders on genocide"
Of the 1,110 men and 6,418 women sterilised in North Carolina between 1929 and 1974, state health officials estimate about 2,900 could still be alive.

In recent years several states have re-examined their forgotten legacies - prodded in some cases by newspaper investigations - and extended official apologies.

North Carolina did so in 2003, but Mr Womble has continued to push for monetary compensation to the victims.

This month, a state task force created by his legislation will hold a public session at which surviving victims are expected to tell their stories.

The group will eventually make a recommendation for compensation to the governor - $20,000 per person has been suggested.

But the state is facing a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) budget shortfall. The conservative Republicans in control of the state legislature are already poised to slash transport, healthcare and education funds, so it seems unlikely lawmakers will authorise as much as $58m in reparations.


Some illiterate patients signed an X on forms consenting to be sterilised
"My hope is that the state will recognise that there's never going to be a good time for compensation," says Charmaine Cooper, executive director of the Justice for Sterilization Victims Task Force, the state body.

Among those expected to testify is Ms Riddick, who now lives in Atlanta. She describes the prospect of a $20,000 payment as an insult.

"I am very angry," she says. "God said be fruitful and multiply. They did not only sin against me, they sinned against God."

Theres currently a charity, also based in the N. Carolina that offers to pay drug addicts to be sterilised. Have to say its not something I'd be entirely against, but at the same time if addicts do manage to turn their lives around they'd have no opportunity to have children and may regret it
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11545519

Drug addicts across the UK are being offered money to be sterilised by an American charity.

Project Prevention is offering to pay £200 to any drug user in London, Glasgow, Bristol, Leicester and parts of Wales who agrees to be operated on.

The first person in the UK to accept the cash is drug addict "John" from Leicester who says he "should never be a father".

The move has been criticised by some drug charities who work with addicts.

Continue reading the main story
Related stories

Should sterilisation be encouraged? Your views
Should drug addicts be paid to get sterilised?
Anger over 'sterilisation offer'
Project Prevention founder Barbara Harris admitted her methods amounted to "bribery", but said it was the only way to stop babies being physically and mentally damaged by drugs during pregnancy.

Drug treatment charity Addaction estimates one million children in the UK are living with parents who abuse drugs.

Pregnant addicts can pass on the dependency to the unborn child, leading to organ and brain damage.

Mrs Harris set up her charity in North Carolina after adopting the children of a crack addict.

Damage to children
Speaking to the BBC's Inside Out programme, she said: "The birth mother of my children obviously dabbled in all drugs and alcohol - she literally had a baby every year for eight years.

"I get very angry about the damage that drugs do to these children."

After paying 3,500 addicts across the United States not to have children, she is now visiting parts of the UK blighted by drugs to encourage users to undergo "long-term birth control" for cash.

John, a 38-year-old addict from Leicester, is the first person in the UK to accept money to have a vasectomy after being involved in drugs since he was 12.

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Start Quote

It might work in America but Great Britain is a very different country”

Maria Cripps
Dovetail Centre
He said: "It was something that I'd been thinking about for a long time.

"I won't be able to support a kid; I can just about manage to support myself."

Simon Antrobus, chief executive of Addaction, said while no-one wanted to see children brought up in a drug-using environment, there was no place for Project Prevention in the UK.

"It exploits very vulnerable people who are addicted to drugs and alcohol at probably the lowest point in their lives," he said.

The Reverend Robert Black, of Victory Outreach, which works with former addicts in east London, said he thought Project Prevention's aims were "very devious".

Reversible contraception
Maria Cripps, team leader at Islington's Dovetail service which is part of Cranstoun Drug Services, said: "I think Barbara uses some very extreme examples to get her point across. It might work in America but Great Britain is a very different country."

But Reverend Martin Blakebrough, director of Camden's Kaleidoscope Project in north London, said sterilisation was "worth considering" if it was right for the individual.

A spokesperson at the British Medical Association said: "The BMA's ethics committee does not have a view on the charity Project Prevention.

"As with all requests for treatment, doctors need to be confident that the individual has the capacity to make the specific decision at the time the decision is required.

"The BMA's ethics committee also believes that doctors should inform patients of the benefits of reversible contraception so that the patients have more reproductive choices in the future."

robtri

humanji wrote: »

It's a conspiracy theory which was proven true.

how is this a conspiracy theory?? it was public knowledge at the time.. so is it a conspiracy theory??

Penn

robtri wrote: »

how is this a conspiracy theory?? it was public knowledge at the time.. so is it a conspiracy theory??

Possible reasons why it could be a conspiracy theory include why did they do this, who authorised it, was there another reason behind it etc

If you have a problem with a thread, please report it rather than posting on the thread.

PunkFreud

I've no problem with sterilizations in the right circumstances. I know I know of a woman who was always drunk. Her 4 children were neglected as a result. She recently has given birth to a new child, who she is allowed keep. This child is also being neglected.

In other words, good for Michigan

Monty Burnz

PunkFreud wrote: »

I've no problem with sterilizations in the right circumstances. I know I know of a woman who was always drunk. Her 4 children were neglected as a result. She recently has given birth to a new child, who she is allowed keep. This child is also being neglected.

In other words, good for Michigan

There was a story like this on Ray D'Arcy the other day. A woman who had 15 children by different fathers over 25 years or so and dumped them all into care, one after another. One of the eldest children contacted Raydar with the story of how she had tracked down a brother on Facebook. She'd had a very hard life. She was worried about her youngest half brother, who is only 4.

It's a messy area.

studiorat

Barrington wrote: »

Possible reasons why it could be a conspiracy theory include why did they do this, who authorised it, was there another reason behind it etc

There were laws about it, it was part of scientific thought at the time. So I suppose that since it would have been discussed before the law was pased one could call that a conspiracy!

However it was never a secret; Harvard, Cornell and Columbia, offered courses in eugenics. U.S. biologists like Charles B. Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin advocated keeping the "Anglo-American race" pure. Laughlin drafted a eugenics law for Virginia in 1924. J. H. Kellogg supported the creation of eugenics groups and organizations.

Let's not forget it was acceptable (and legal!) to own slaves in the same country only 40 years previously.

humanji

robtri wrote: »

how is this a conspiracy theory?? it was public knowledge at the time.. so is it a conspiracy theory??

The victims claim they were lied to.