State should get serious about finding sterilization victims

Forty-eight sterilization victims. That's the sum total of victims the state has found after more than a year of half-hearted searching. That's shameful, considering how quickly earlier generations of state officials rounded up more than 7,600 victims to render them barren.

"It's just aggravating," one of those victims, Lela Dunston, told me last week. She was 13 when she was sterilized in Wilmington in 1963.

"The state is talking about it can't find the victims and all this mess. I think that's ridiculous."

Indeed. The state quickly tracked down those it wanted to operate on, some as young as 9, self-righteously believing, at least at first, that sterilizing groups including the blind, the epileptic and the feeble-minded" would "better society." So where is the righteous zeal in finding them in 2011, now that victims suffer and die off, even as there's a growing consensus in the legislature that these victims were wronged and should be compensated?

Money has always trumped righteousness on this issue.

As the junk science of eugenics upon which the state's forced sterilization program was based upon crumbled, the program became more about thinning the welfare rolls. There were too many mouths to feed, and the state needed to save money. After World War II, as most other states saw the light and abandoned their eugenics programs, North Carolina ramped its up, targeting black girls and women of modest means as it became one of the most aggressive programs in the country.

After the Journal exposed the program's inner workings in the 2002 series "Against Their Will," politicians often gave lip service to compensation. But they couldn't afford it just now, they kept saying.

And now, as the debate on compensation finally heats up, with top leaders of the new Republican majority supporting compensation, the whole debate could be weakened by the fact that state officials really don't have a clue as to how many of the victims are still living.

They lack the money to find them.

Charmaine Fuller Cooper, the director of Gov. Perdue's Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, said that her agency, set up with $250,000 allocated from the state legislature, has put pamphlets and posters in agencies across the state and set up a hotline for potential victims to call. But there is no more money for outreach, she said.

The state should find some more money for that purpose — on the condition that the foundation try to find current addresses for every living victim in its files, and send them letters. They could certainly find many of the victims using DMV and other files. A state that can find criminals and tax-dodgers can find people it has wronged, too. Workers from other state agencies could be assigned to assist Fuller Cooper and her two part-time workers.

Fuller Cooper, an earnest advocate, worries about invading the victims' privacy. But the letters could go out in unmarked envelopes. They could convey a simple message: "We are trying to locate all victims of the state's sterilization program. We believe you may be one of its victims. We will protect your privacy, and you may eventually be eligible for compensation from the state. Please contact us."

Surely, many victims, including ones previously unaware of compensation potential, would respond. Their input would be crucial as discussion of compensation begins in earnest this spring, when, it's hoped, Republican leaders and Perdue will sit down and hammer out a plan for compensation payments to begin by summer. That plan should also include medical benefits for physical and mental ills, perhaps through the state's university hospitals.

But sterilization victims whom I often talk to tell me that, more than anything else, they want financial compensation. Several of them suffer from emotional and physical ills left by their operations.

The state should find the victims and compensate them. It should spend its money to help them as easily as it spent its money to hurt them.