Proposal would spur eugenics reparations
The decision this year by state lawmakers to set aside $400,000 as compensation for Virginians forcibly sterilized decades ago marks a small but meaningful gesture of societal penance.
The payments, capped at $25,000 per individual, can never fully compensate for the injury the state inflicted on some 7,000 Virginians in the name of eugenics.
That doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t try, or that today’s leaders are absolved from acknowledging the barbaric injustices of their predecessors. Past officials misused their power to deprive men and women of the ability to have children by citing an array of alleged offenses, including promiscuity, alcoholism and criminal behavior, to justify sterilization.
Many of the victims were poor, disabled, young and black.
The compensation, however small, ought to go entirely to each intended recipient — without carrying the risk of continued interference from the heavy hands of government.
That’s the idea behind a bipartisan proposal pending in Congress.
The measure, which would exclude compensation for state eugenics programs from affecting recipients’ federal benefits, is championed by senators from three states that were among the most fervent adopters of sterilization programs that swept the nation in the early and mid 20th century.
Virginia’s senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, as well as Delaware’s Tom Carper and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Richard Burr, introduced the proposal last month. The “Treatment of Certain Payments in Eugenics Compensation Act” would eliminate red tape that otherwise could accompany victims’ receipt of state-issued compensation.
In 2013, North Carolina became the first state to approve reparations for eugenics victims — estimated at 7,600 — by setting aside $10 million.
Virginia finally followed this year, setting aside $400,000 as a starter fund capable of compensating 16 people. It remains unclear how many victims are still alive; when lawmakers approved the budget amendment, only 11 had been identified and vetted.
Records show that the majority of the more than 7,000 people forcibly sterilized under Virginia’s 1924 law were victimized in the 1930s and 1940s. State officials estimate about 360 might still be alive, eligible for payment and actually apply for it.
That so many victims died without their government ever fully acknowledging the inhumanity of its actions serves as an everlasting shame.
The eugenics program — upheld in 1927 by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision that reflected the repugnant moral contortions popular at the time — remained enshrined in state law until the General Assembly finally repealed it in 1979. In 2002, as Virginia’s governor, Warner publicly apologized on behalf of the state for its role in the “shameful effort.”
When state lawmakers and Gov. Terry McAuliffe approved funding this year, they included language directing the state Department of Medical Assistance Services to obtain federal authority to give the $25,000 awards in a way that didn’t affect recipients’ Medicaid eligibility.
The proposal put forward in Congress would eliminate any lingering doubts about payments in Virginia, North Carolina or roughly 30 other states that sterilized their people.
North Carolina and Virginia have set an example for those other states to follow.
Through its approval of the bipartisan measure proposed by five senators, Congress could provide the prodding necessary for more states to finally, belatedly, come to terms with their own brutal legacies.
