Righting a Wrong: NC to Pay Victims of Forced Sterilization
By Kimberly Johnson,
Aljazeera America
| 08. 23. 2013
Willis Lynch clearly remembers the day, 66 years ago, when his bloodline was stopped.
Lynch was only 14 years old when the state of North Carolina forcibly sterilized him while he was a student at the Caswell Training School for Mental Defectives in Kinston, N.C. The school was a holding tank for children who were mentally disabled or were delinquents or unwed mothers. Sterilization was required before they could return to their families, according to documents from the state's eugenics board.
Lynch, now 80, says memories of the operation are still vivid: the nurse putting a mask over his face and then asking him to sing her a song while he inhaled the anesthetic.
"I didn’t know what was going on," he said -- not even the next day, when he found himself stooped over trying to get out of bed. Many years later, however, he discovered state documents that made clear he had been given a vasectomy. Lynch said officials also documented the desire to operate on his mother, who was reliant on state welfare.
"They didn't want her...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...
By Beth Duff-Brown, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research | 07.12.2024
The debate over in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a hot-button policy and political issue, despite the medical procedure to help people become pregnant having been mainstream in the United States for nearly half a century.
The Alabama Supreme Court ...
By Gilma Avalos, NBC | 07.03.2024
Image by Josh Appel from Unsplash
The dream of becoming parents is turning into a nightmare for hundreds of people caught up in a surrogacy money scandal.
Some of the individuals are facing infertility or medical challenges, seeing surrogacy as...