Virginia sterilization program

Historians have noted that Nazi Germany likely modeled its forced sterilization programs on the American eugenics programs of the s. Few today would not be revolted by such strident branding of whole classes of individuals and families. Few would similarly countenance forcible state-sanctioned sterilizations, as still happens today, to near universal condemnation, in certain dictatorial regimes bent on population control.

Direct sterilizations violate human dignity. At its core, medicine should be about fixing damaged systems of the body rather than damaging healthy systems.

Whenever we face situations where family members with severe mental illness or other disabilities may not be suited to the responsibilities and demands of having children and parenting, and hence ought not to get married, the solution should never be direct sterilization but tailored care that addresses their specific mental health situation and respects their human sexual nature by ordering it along a path of chastity.

This implies that caretakers for the seriously mentally ill in institutional settings should assure that residents are not given opportunities to engage in sexual encounters with others, that they be safeguarded from access to sexually-explicit media and internet pornography, that they be instructed on the importance of chastity to the extent possible with their mental disability, and that residential settings be appropriately segregated as single-sex facilities.

In terms of the number of compulsory or coerced sterilizations during this time period, Virginia is outranked only by California, which forcibly sterilized an estimated 20, Californians. More than 30 U. Overwhelmingly, it was the marginalized in society — the poor, the uneducated, the physically or mentally disabled, immigrants, and minorities — who were targeted by these programs. The Buck v.

Bell case centered on year-old Carrie Buck who was raped and subsequently gave birth to a daughter. The fact that she was young, poor, and undereducated made her situation all the more difficult. Excerpt from the documentary Fixed to Fail: Buck vs. Bell :. Relf v. In , the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Relf sisters, revealing that , to , poor people were being sterilized each year under federally-funded programs.

Deborah Reid of the National Health Law program writes :. Accompanying that right is the obligation of the government and larger society to create laws, policies, and systems conducive to supporting those decisions. For organizations such as the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health , reproductive justice involves not only access to affordable birth control, abortion, and health care, but also providing access to women who are being held in immigration detention centers.

Words were promiscuous, propensity to alcoholism, socially inadequate, defective, unfit. Virginia is the second state to compensate its victims. California is the next state where the Christian Law Institute will focus on gaining compensation for forced sterilization victims. The state sterilized 20, people from to , more than twice as many people as Virginia did during that time. Gray Davis followed suit in California in This website uses cookies.

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