Sterilization victims: How much $?

Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C.

It’s a question that has not been answered before and doesn’t have an easy solution: How do you repay people for taking away their ability to have children?

North Carolina’s Eugenics Compensation Task Force is the first in the nation to tackle that question and is set today to recommend how much to pay victims of forced sterilization, along with whether the victims’ descendants are eligible for the money.

“If we all agree that there is no amount that restore somebody’s loss of ability to procreate, then it’s understood that the ultimate figure is an attempt to put out an active apology instead of a verbal apology,” said task force member Demetrius Worley Berry, a Greensboro attorney.

This is not an attempt to compensate, repair or restore what happened years ago.”

State officials sterilized more than 7,600 people in North Carolina from 1929 to 1974 under eugenics programs, which at the time were aimed at creating a better society by weeding out people such as criminals and mentally disabled people considered undesirable.

The panel has discussed amounts between $20,000 and $50,000 a person.

At the panel’s meeting last month, Berry suggested paying $20,000 to living victims, though chairwoman Laura Gerald said she wanted to consider a higher amount.

Victims reacted angrily, saying they deserved more money, and descendants argued the estates of victims who have since died also should be paid. Some have suggested as much as $1 million per victim.

Most victims were poor, black women deemed unfit to be parents. People as young as 10 were sterilized for reasons as minor as not getting along with schoolmates or being promiscuous.

Although officials obtained consent from patients or their guardians, many did not comprehend what they were signing.