‘You Simply Really feel Like Nothing’: California to Pay Sterilization Victims

Leonard Bisel was 15 when the State of California decided he shouldn’t have children and threatened to lock him up and use forced labor if he didn’t undergo sterilization.

In the middle of his operation, Mr Bisel recalled, now 88, he woke up. “It was really painful,” he said, “and the doctor told me to shut up.”

Influenced by a movement known as eugenics, whose supporters believed that people with physical disabilities, psychiatric disorders, and other illnesses were “genetically defective,” government programs forcibly sterilized more than 60,000 people in the United States during the 20th century.

They comprised more than 20,000 people over seven decades in California, under a eugenics bill passed in 1909. Almost all of the state’s procedures were carried out through institutions, like the one Mr Bisel lived in, and none were required by law to obtain the patient’s consent. Some of the sterilized were only eleven years old.

Even after California repealed its eugenics law in 1979, women in prison continued to be sterilized, sometimes without ensuring their consent was lawfully obtained, according to a 2014 status report that followed a revelation by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Now, under a legislature-approved budget pending approval from the governor, California is poised to spend $ 7.5 million to find and pay an estimated 600 surviving victims of forced sterilization, both under the Eugenics Act and in prison, estimated at $ 25,000 each.

The move follows similar efforts in Virginia and North Carolina to compensate victims of the eugenics movement that peaked in the United States in the early 20th century and inspired similar practices in Nazi Germany. 32 states had some form of government-funded program that forced sterilization of immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, and others labeled “undesirable” under the guise of public health.

Nationwide support for reparations for the descendants of enslaved people has increased in recent years, including in California, where attempts are being made to develop proposals to compensate black residents for centuries of systemic discrimination and inequality. Making amends for victims of involuntary sterilization is seen by some advocates as a similar first step in recognizing the long history of discrimination against people with disabilities in the country.

“There are still many prejudices against people with disabilities and the assumption that in the most extreme form they are not livable, not born and certainly not worthy of education,” says Alexandra Minna Stern, Stern of Michigan University professor who is an expert in eugenics and reproductive rights is.

Not everyone who was forcibly sterilized under the California program had a disability. The vast majority were poor and many were state wards of so-called “broken houses”. Many had previously suffered abuse, and many were Black, Latino, Asian-American, or Native American.

Mr Bisel ended up in an asylum called the Sonoma State Home in Eldridge, California after his father’s death; his mother was previously housed in institutions and could not look after him. He said he felt he had no choice but to undergo sterilization. He was labeled “dull” on his medical forms.

Records show that Mr Bisel’s mother was also sterilized in the same facility.

“You just feel like nothing,” he said. “You are worthless.”

Mr. Bisel now lives in Selah, Washington. He married, adopted two daughters and now has six grandchildren. According to California’s reparation proposal, he would have to apply for the money and be approved. The victims would have two years to report.

Similar programs in other states have had a hard time distributing money, in part because many victims have died or were difficult to track down. To overcome this obstacle, part of the California budget proposal would allocate $ 2 million to the state’s Victims Compensation Committee for liaising and working with social justice organizations.

“The real shame for me is that politicians and the public have hesitated for decades to address this issue,” said Paul A. Lombardo, a Georgia State University law professor who studied the eugenics movement, “and now most people “. those who would have benefited from it are dead. “

Representative Wendy Carrillo, a Los Angeles Democrat who backed the restitution proposal, said she plans to seek justice for other victims of systemic abuse, including those who have been forcibly sterilized in unmanaged facilities such as county hospitals and federal prisons. Many of these victims in California were Latinas.

“It’s incredibly annoying, especially because these women could be my grandmother, they could be my mother, they could be my neighbor,” said Ms. Carillo, who identifies as Mexican and Salvadoran.

In North Carolina, the first state to pay reparations for its decade-long eugenics program, significant numbers of forcibly sterilized people were black women like Elaine Riddick, now 67. She was 13 when she was raped and 14 years old. When she gave birth to her son, the state sterilized her without her knowledge. In the papers she was referred to as “feeble-minded”.

She didn’t find out until she was older, married, and tried to get pregnant.

“It is a very painful thing to find out that your government has allowed this to happen,” said Ms. Riddick. “So that they penetrate you at such a young tender age and destroy the inside of your body. My body wasn’t even developed. “

She eventually received nearly $ 50,000 from the North Carolina reparations program, she said. But she would have preferred to have more children.