Kummenti għad-Djarju ta' Santa Fawstina par 778-786 (Fr. ...
taught me how to prepare for the Feast of Christmas. I saw Her today, without the Infant Jesus. She said to me: My daughter, strive after silence ...
Pepperspray Video Collective's Weekly Podcast
N.C. eugenics survivors seek justice
In 1968, at just 14 years old, Elaine became one of the thousands of victims of North Carolina’s forced sterilization program. Quietly and efficiently operating from 1929 until 1974, the program’s purpose was to weed out the “unfit” of society by stopping them from reproducing.
Elaine is sitting in a quiet apartment high above the noise of Atlanta traffic. A well-dressed, poised and dignified African-American woman in her mid-50s, it is difficult to imagine her as the young girl that she describes.
As a teenager in tiny Winfall, N.C., Elaine had already known poverty and violence. She had witnessed her father cutting her mother’s throat from ear to ear in an alcohol-induced rage. She remembers frequently missing school. When she did show up, she was dirty and unkempt. She sometimes stole food from other children’s lunches because she was always hungry. At just 13 years old, she was raped and impregnated by a neighbor’s brother who was in his 20s. Elaine remembers that he threatened to kill her if she told anybody. Elaine was 14 when she gave birth to what was to be her only child, a son, in 1968 at Chowan Hospital in Edenton. She doesn’t remember much about her hospital visit, but she was told that she almost died and had to stay in the hospital a week longer than her son.
For the next few years, Elaine says she remembers having frequent stomach pain and hemorrhaging so severe that at 16 she was admitted to a hospital. The doctor gave her little information, but she remembers he remarked that she’d been “butchered.”
However, Elaine didn’t know what that meant until, at 19, she went to a doctor again. By then she was married and she and her husband wanted to start a family. After talking with the doctor and one of her sisters, she finally realized that she had been sterilized right after her son’s birth five years before.
Like Elaine, tens of thousands of people across the country were victims of eugenic sterilizations. But North Carolina was something of an anomaly. Most of the states with eugenic sterilization programs dismantled them after World War II when the horrors of the Holocaust were uncovered. North Carolina, however, ramped up its program in the postwar years, increasingly targeting poor black women during the ’50s and ’60s.
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