State Run Castration Centers
You can't say "It can't happen here"
because it did happen here.
(Daily Mail) - Victims who were involuntarily sterilized by state officials more than 30 years ago will be compensated.
More than 7,000 people were permanently made infertile between 1924 and 1979 under the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act.
The Act was widely accepted at the time and was even said to have partly inspired Adolf Hitler to create a master race in Germany.
But now the 11 victims who are still alive will receive $25,000 in compensation, Virginia General Assembly decided on Thursday.
Eugenics sought to improve the genetic composition of humankind by preventing those considered 'defective' from reproducing.
The All-Powerful State decides who is worthy to have sex. |
One victim, Lewis Reynolds, was presumed to have epilepsy when he was 13-years-old and was taken to one of six state institutions to be treated.
Decades later he discovered the fits were a temporary symptom after he was hit in the head with a rock - but the sterilization was permanent.
The 87-year-old former firearms instructor, from Lynchburg, said: 'I think they've done me wrong.
'I couldn't have a family like everybody else does. They took my rights away.'
Reynolds' first wife left him after she learned they couldn't have children.
And although his marriage to second wife Delores lasted 47 years, the couple would cry about their inability to have a family.
The compensation measure was sponsored by Ben Cline, a conservative Republican from Rockbridge, and Patrick Hope, a liberal Democrat from Arlington.
Mr Cline said: 'There was a growing consensus that we needed to act while we still had the opportunity to look these people in the eye and acknowledge the wrong that was committed against them so many years ago.'
Nearly 65,000 Americans were sterilized in 33 states, including more than 20,000 in California alone.
One judge, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., said in 1927: 'Three generations of imbeciles are enough.'
Virginia is the second state to approve compensation for victims of the eugenics program. North Carolina approved payments of $50,000 to around 1,800 victims in 2013.
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