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Between 1929 and 1974, the state of North Carolina sterilized around 7,600 people whom it deemed unfit for parenting.
Other states had similar eugenics programs, but most discontinued them after World War II because it so resembled Nazi Germany’s push to create a pure master race.
Not so in North Carolina, where 70 percent of those involuntary sterilizations were performed after World War II.
The involuntary sterilization program was aimed at eliminating babies from people judged by a N.C. Eugenics Board to be feeble-minded or somehow defective. The bulk of them – nearly 3,000 — were carried out in the 1950s.
It wasn’t until 2003 that the law was struck from the books.
And that’s just the ones officially sanctioned by the state. Many more were sterilized under county eugenics programs.
Most were girls and women. The majority were white, except from 1960 to 1968 when more non-white citizens were sterilized, according to the N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation.
Most were poor women. Others, some as young as 10 years old, were sterilized for reasons such as not getting...