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 In a Sacramento government office, historian and lead author
Alexandra Minna Stern stumbled across a filing cabinet containing
about 20,000 recommendations for eugenics-motivated sterilizations
dating from 1919 through 1952.
Stern, a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and
her colleagues used the documents and actuarial tables to calculate
that as many as 831 men, women and children slated for sterilization
could still be alive and would be on average almost 88 years old.
Many of the typewritten and signed sterilization recommendations
were for children, the youngest 7 years old, Stern said in a phone
interview.
One was for Rose Zaballos. Today she would be 93. But she died in
1939, when she was just 16, on the operating table at the Sonoma
State Home during surgery to prevent her from conceiving, according
to her niece, Barbara Swarr of Hayward, California. In a phone
interview, Swarr described her aunt as “mentally retarded.”
California had the right to sterilize Rose Zaballos under a 1909
state law authorizing reproductive surgery on patients committed to
homes or hospitals and judged to have a “mental disease which may
have been inherited” and was “likely to be transmitted to
descendants,” Stern's team writes in the American Journal of Public
Health.
The California statute provided the legal framework for the most
active sterilization program in the U.S., the study says. The law
remained on the books until 1979.
“This was one of these dramatic and significant episodes in the
state’s history that shouldn’t be forgotten,” Stern said. “Each of
these 20,000 people was their own individual, with their own life
story, loves, passions.
“They are people who should have been treated with dignity,” she
said.
In 2003, then-Governor Gray Davis publicly apologized for the
state-mandated sterilizations. But Stern believes the Californians
who were rendered incapable of conceiving children as a result of
the government program deserve more than just an apology.
“The state could never completely right this wrong,” she said. In
the name of social justice, though, she believes California should
follow the lead of North Carolina and Virginia and offer financial
compensation to those who were forcibly sterilized and are still
alive.
North Carolina has offered $20,000 to each of its sterilization
victims and Virginia offered $25,000, according to Stern’s report.
Attorney and historian Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia
State University in Atlanta, has written extensively about
compulsory sterilization. He praised the new study for filling in
details that could help locate people who could be eligible for
reparations.
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In 2003, when Davis apologized, only one person who had been
forcibly sterilized – a man living in a car in Stockton – could be
located, Lombardo said in a phone interview.
“You had a population of people who didn’t exactly want to put
‘sterilized’ on their resumes,” he said.
The study describes one sterilization recommendation for a woman
admitted to the Sonoma State Home in 1926. She had an IQ of 56,
which led a doctor to categorize her as “low moron.” The physician
deemed her “sly, profane, obstinate, . . . dangerous to public
health” and recommended that she be sterilized.
Stern and her team do not know which of the people recommended for
sterilization actually had the surgery, she said.
California passed the third eugenics law in the U.S. and performed
one-third of all the nation’s estimated 60,000 forced
sterilizations, the study says. Following a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court
decision that upheld the constitutionality of Virginia’s
sterilization law, sterilization rates climbed.
Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the majority opinion
in the case, Buck v. Bell. He compared the state’s duty to sterilize
patient Carrie Buck to the need to protect the public against
smallpox with compulsory vaccinations.
Holmes concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Lombardo would like to see California’s surviving sterilization
victims financially compensated.
“In the name of doing something that is simply about justice,” he
said, “it seems to me the states can afford this.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2fF3K5J American Journal of Public Health,
online November 17, 2016.
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