Women and the Politics of Sterilization: A UNC Press Short, Excerpted from Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare

In 2003, North Carolina became the third U.S. state to apologize and the first to call for compensation to victims of state-ordered sterilizations carried out between 1929 and 1975. The decision was prompted largely by a series of articles in the Winston-Salem Journal. The stories were inspired in part by the meticulous research of Johanna Schoen, who was granted unique access to the papers of the North Carolina Eugenics Board and to summaries of the case histories of nearly 7600 victims — ...