CGS-authored
Elaine Riddick was raped at age 13. After giving birth to her son at age 14, in 1968, she was sterilized without her consent.
She was only one of 7,600 people forcibly sterilized by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina who the state deemed unfit to have children.
Forced sterilization occurred in 32 other states, with California sterilizing the most people and North Carolina sterilizing the third greatest number of people. However, unlike in other states, sterilizations in North Carolina increased after World War II. The drive behind these sterilizations was the eugenics movement: the pseudoscience of improving a society’s gene pool through reducing populations of people with negative traits.
“North Carolina carried out relatively few eugenic sterilizations before WWII, but after the war, it grew far larger and targeted mainly black women,” said Daniel Kevles, Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and author of “In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity,” in an email interview with The Guilfordian.
Although often associated with the Nazi regime in Germany, eugenics was also...