Eugenics is gone, but its emotional scars linger Copyright © 2000 Nando Media Copyright © 2000 Associated Press A poem written in 1920 praises eugenics Number of people sterilized By BILL BASKERVILL LYNCHBURG, Va. (March 19, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - The operating room stands empty and forgotten. It's a silent witness to the horror of forced sexual sterilization under a phony science that left more than 60,000 Americans unable to have children. Beneath a large skylight that funneled sun into the middle of the room, doctors at the old Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded performed vasectomies or cut the fallopian tubes of thousands of people - mostly teenagers - in the belief that stopping the transfer of supposedly bad genes produced superior human beings. The pseudoscience was called eugenics, from the Greek word for well-born. It selective breeding philosophy wreaked incalculable human damage not only in the United States but also in Germany, where the Nazis' embrace of the idea presaged the Holocaust. Virginia was at the center of the eugenics movement in the United States as the state's Southern aristocracy sought to purify the white race under a 1924 state law that served as a model for the rest of the country. Virginia forcibly sterilized people until 1979, but its eugenics victims, like those elsewhere, have been largely forgotten despite the lasting emotional scars of the experience. It wasn't until the 1960s that the pace of sterilizations slowed in the United States - years after eugenics had been widely discredited as political and social prejudice rather than scientific fact. Yet none of the 30 states that conducted eugenical sterilizations ever compensated, apologized to or memorialized the victims, said Paul A. Lombardo, a leading scholar on eugenics. The eugenicists sought out people they considered "poor white trash," said J. David Smith, co-author of "The Sterilization of Carrie Buck." "They came to the attention of someone, a judge or social worker or someone who would diagnose them as being misfits." Virtually anyone in authority could label someone "feebleminded," a catchall term for a number of real and imagined mental disabilities, and pack them off to an institution. But the eugenicists cast their net wide, targeting virtually any human shortcoming they believed was a hereditary disease that could be stamped out by surgical sterilization - including criminal behavior, alcoholism, syphilis and immorality. Sarah Jane Wiley was 22 when she was sterilized at the Virginia Colony. "I wish they hadn't though because I'm crazy about children," she said. "It makes me feel so sad." Wiley was sent to the Colony when she was 12 years old. Ten years later she was sent to the operating room without any idea what was going on. "They didn't tell me nothing. I found out about a month later that they tied my tubes," she said in an interview at her Lynchburg apartment not far from the Colony, now the Central Virginia Training Center for the severely mentally retarded. Wiley's brother, Marvin, and sister, Shirley, also were sterilized at the Colony. Wiley, 63, said the reasons she wound up at the Colony are fuzzy. "My aunt committed me. They called welfare and they put me in the Colony." Wiley was released from the Colony in 1976 and went on to become a licensed practical nurse. Her framed discharge letter hangs on her living room wall. "Best of luck in the future," it says. Jesse F. Meadows, sterilized at the Colony in 1940, has been mostly alone since his wife, Trudy, died in 1989. Since then "it's been one hard and lonely life," he said. "But, thank God, it will be over someday." Meadows was sent to the Colony in June 1940 when he was 17. "My stepmother said she was leaving unless Daddy got rid of me," he said. Meadows remembers his operation five months after arriving at the Colony. "They said it would keep me from having feebleminded children," he said. "There was nothing I could do about it." Meadows, 77, said he always wanted to have children of his own. Now, he lives in a sparsely furnished, second-floor apartment with his 13-year-old Chihuahua, Angel. Mary Donald, 64, was sterilized at age 11. She said she does not know why she was sent to the Virginia Colony and that she was told only that the operation was for her own health. She attributes the breakup of her 10-year marriage to her sterility. "I used to ... lay and cry" about not having children, she said. The eugenicists rarely targeted blacks. "There were already so many constraints and social control mechanisms in place for people of color," Smith said. "They really didn't pose a threat to the power structure." Conceived in 1883 by Charles Darwin's cousin and disciple Sir Francis Galton, eugenics was quickly embraced in the United States. Indiana enacted the nation's first eugenical sterilization law in 1907, and Connecticut followed soon afterward. The American Eugenics Society was created and proceeded to organize "fitter family contests" at state fairs. A 1926 AES display in Philadelphia warned that "some Americans are born to be a burden on the rest" unless the reproduction of inferior people were controlled. But the movement did not win widespread approval until the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia's eugenics law in 1927. By the 1930s, nearly two-thirds of the states had eugenics laws, but no states applied them as ardently as Virginia, California and North Carolina. California sterilized more than 20,000 people, the most in the nation. Virginia sterilized 7,450 and North Carolina sterilized nearly 6,300. The 1924 Virginia Statute for Eugenical Sterilization required sexual sterilization of the "insane, idiotic, imbecile, feebleminded or epileptic" in the belief they would produce similarly disabled offspring. Albert S. Priddy, the Virginia Colony's first superintendent and a leading eugenicist, targeted Carrie Buck, committed to the Colony in 1924 at age 17, as the first person to be sterilized under the law. A legal challenge was brought on Buck's behalf to test the constitutionality of the statute. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law on May 2, 1927, in an 8-1 ruling written by Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. "It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind," the chief justice wrote. Buck, who was sterilized 5 1/2 months after the Supreme Court ruling, had been committed to the Colony by her foster father because she had become pregnant as a teenager, the victim of rape by a relative of her foster parents. The Colony labeled her a "moral delinquent ... of the moron class." Research years later determined that Buck had average intelligence and that her defense lawyer, a member of the Virginia Colony's first board of directors, conspired with the lawyer for the Colony to guarantee that she would lose her case, said Lombardo, a University of Virginia professor who has studied the eugenics movement for 20 years. The Virginia law, with its Supreme Court imprimatur, had a dramatic impact in Germany, where Hitler's 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases contained language that echoed the Virginia statute, Lombardo said. The Nazis forcibly sterilized 2 million people and then carried its racial purity policy a step further by murdering millions in the Holocaust. At the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, the Carrie Buck case and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling were cited by attorneys for accused Nazis as the precedent for the Nazi race purity programs. Harry H. Laughlin, a biologist who was the most forceful advocate for compulsory sterilization in the United States, wrote the law on which the Virginia and German eugenics statutes were based. In 1936, Laughlin received an honorary medical degree from the Nazi-controlled University of Heidelberg for his contributions to the "science of race cleansing." Laughlin spent most of his career campaigning for eugenic sterilization of what he called the "most worthless one-tenth of our present population." Prominent supporters of eugenics included Alexander Graham Bell, economist John Maynard Keynes and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Laughlin also was architect of the notorious Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 that ended the greatest era of immigration in U.S. history. He successfully argued before Congress that the American gene pool was being polluted by intellectually and morally defective immigrants from eastern and southern Europe. The act, which wasn't repealed until 1965, targeted Italians and eastern European Jews. When he signed the act, President Calvin Coolidge commented that "America must remain American." Richard E. Kellogg, Virginia's mental health commissioner since 1998, said the eugenics era was a dark period for the mentally disabled. "The eugenics movement reminds me of the shackles and irons, lobotomies," he said. "I think it represents ... really terrible, unfortunate remedies that people thought were treatment. Society has no higher obligation than to treat people with disabilities with dignity and respect." Many eugenicists believed they were on the cutting edge of science and were performing a public service, an example of how science can be misused, experts said. Some worry that it could happen again with today's fast-moving genetic research that one day could "improve" the human stock by allowing parents to select favorable traits in their children. Doctors soon will have the ability to predict the medical futures of their patients, possibly creating a genetic underclass of people with bleak medical futures. "People in the eugenics movement believed they could fix all problems of society with some kind of scientific prescription," Lombardo said. "I think there is always a danger when we get so excited about the hopeful side of scientific progress and forget that science can be misused as well." President Clinton repeatedly has focused attention on the potential dark side of the phenomenal advances in genetic research. "This extraordinary march of human understanding imposes on us a profound responsibility to make sure that the age of discovery can continue to reflect our most cherished values," he told a February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "We must protect our citizens' privacy - the bulwark of personal liberty, the safeguard of individual creativity." Clinton barred federal agencies from discriminating against employees on the basis of genetic tests. He also urged Congress to prohibit the private sector from refusing to hire people at risk for health problems and insurers from refusing to cover them. While most states had repealed their eugenics laws by the 1960s, Virginia waited until 1979 to remove all statutory references to involuntary sterilization of people with "hereditary forms of mental illness that are recurrent." The last two involuntary sterilizations were performed in the state in 1979, both at the Virginia Colony. Some former patients of state institutions filed a class-action lawsuit against Virginia in 1980, alleging many sterilization victims were never told the nature of the operation they were to undergo. A federal judge dismissed the suit four years later, noting that the Supreme Court's 1927 ruling in the Carrie Buck case was still the constitutional standard for sterilization. As recently as March 3, a state judge in Michigan dismissed a lawsuit filed by a man sterilized at the Lapeer State School in 1944; the statute of limitations had run out. It is unlikely, however, that anyone could be involuntarily sterilized in the United States today because of state laws prohibiting it, Lombardo said. Jean McEwen, program director for Ethical, Legal and Social Implications research at the national Human Genome Project, said the difference between eugenics and today's genetic advances is the lack of government control over the individual. "It is more a question of private decision-making than the government making laws like involuntary sterilization," she said. "People have access to genetic information and use it in a private way largely as they choose." But she said the Human Genome Project, run by the National Institutes of Health, is sensitive to the potential for abuse. "The whole reason the ELSI program was established was because of concern we not repeat mistakes of the past," she said.