The Veritable Smorgasbord

"I'm just preparing my impromptu remarks."- Sir Winston Curchill

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Location: San Francisco, California, United States

I'm a 30 year old San Francisco resident by way of Virginia, currently working as an alumni affairs officer at a major research university in the Bay Area. I mainly write about politics, sports, music, and culture. I am a 1999 graduate of the University of Virginia with a degree in Foreign Affairs. I am hoping to begin a master's degree program in Journalism in the next few years.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

A Down Home atrocity


It sounds like something concocted by Hitler...the state forcibly sterilizing thousands of citizens in the name of creating a better gene pool. You would think such a thing would have met it's end with the fall of Nazi Germany, but the sad truth is that at least 30 states in the U.S. had laws on the books pertaining to eugenics. In some cases, the justification for the procedures were thin at best, citing laziness and being promiscuous as reasons. The most prominent case has been that of North Carolina, which unlike many other states, has at least owned up to the practice. Newsweek first reported on this in it's March 28 issue. The report states that 70,000 Americans underwent forced sterilization until the idea of eugenics fell out of favor.

More disturbing is the fact the vast majority of people sterilized under the plan in its later years were either welfare recipients or black. Newsweek reports that, "North Carolina's sterilization program zeroed in on welfare recipients. Over the last 15 years of its operation, 99 percent of the victims were women; more than 60 percent were black."

In America, this kind of thing should have been unthinkable. North Carolina is attempting to put in place a plan to repay the victims, but no amount of money could ever replace the ability of these people to have children and start families.

The silence on this issue from the right to life camp is deafening. In their zeal to protect all life, where is the outrage over the killing of innocents sanctioned by the United States government...or is it ok if its poor blacks and those on welfare who aren't allowed the basic human right to produce offspring?