An Outrage: NC Black Women Were Sterilized
An Outrage: NC Black Women Were Sterilized
By Sheryl Huggins Salomon - The Root
Back in 1967 Elaine Riddick was raped in North Carolina at the age of 13 by a neighbor. She says that the state raped her again when it ordered that she be sterilized immediately after giving birth.
Shocking is that sounds, North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government-run eugenics boards aimed at curbing birth rates among poor, black, and disabled women.
Eugenicists believed that sterilization was a way to address poverty and the spread of lifestyles they considered to be dysfunctional, a way of thinking rooted in racism and class prejudice.