The Senate on Monday voted to bolster compensation received by victims of 20th century eugenics programs.
The body approved by unanimous consent a bill that would exclude from federal welfare deductions state governments’ payments to those harmed by their erstwhile authoritarian gene pool management regimes. The legislation has not yet been taken up by the House of Representatives.
In a statement issued Tuesday praising the vote, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) noted that Virginia “forcibly sterilize[d] nearly 7,500 Virginians between 1924 and 1979”—an act that the legislator apologized for in 2002, as governor of the state.
“His apology was the first by the governor of any of the more than 30 states that conducted eugenics sterilizations on a combined 60,000 citizens,” the press release noted. “Gov. Warner’s act coincided with the 75th anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell decision upholding Virginia’s eugenics sterilization law.”
Earlier this year, Virginia approved of legislation grating $25,000 each to living victims of its eugenics program—a reward described as insufficient by The Washington Post’s editorial board.
“That comes to compensation for just 16 individuals, an initiative so paltry that it fails at even symbolically righting the wrong,” it noted last week. “There is vague talk of a museum to memorialize the victims, and lawmakers may appropriate more money next year, but a sense of urgency is lacking.”
The Post described the programs as having attacked people of all races deemed “mentally ill, epileptic or ‘feebleminded,’ in the parlance of the 1920s and ’30s.” It noted that states sterilized many who were unaware of what was being done to them–“all in the pseudo-scientific cause of enhancing the nation’s genetic stock.”
Only one other state has agreed to compensate victims of its eugenics regimes: North Carolina, in 2013, appropriated $10 million to assist survivors. Each one of the 200 identifiable victims was set to receive $50,000 when the fund was established.
Both senators from the Tar Heel State, Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), co-sponsored the measure, along with Warner, and Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Tom Carper (D-Del.). It was introduced by Tillis in June.
“This shameful period in Virginia’s history is thankfully in the past, but there are still living victims who are suffering from its dark legacy,” Warner said.
“Largely unnoticed, forced sterilizations and state-run eugenics programs represent one of the darkest episodes of human rights violations and injustices of our country’s past,” Kaine also noted. “I’m glad that Virginia has begun the process of compensating victims, but there is still more we must do.”
