Goethe bragged to a colleague: “Your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought.”
Germany’s “epoch-making program,” resulting in the forced sterilization of over 400,000 human beings, was to expand into a still more “epoch-making program”—the Holocaust. At the bottom of it was the American-imported pseudoscience of eugenics, made possible through the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation. The foundation funneled $410,000 (equivalent to $4 million today) to the study of purifying the superior race, and another $250,000 (over $2 million today) into the creation of the German Institute for Psychiatric Research. The foundation continued to fund German research into the most efficient means of mass sterilization through the 1930s, with grants to, among others, Josef Mengele. Mengele then promptly went to Auschwitz, where he used Jews and other “undesirables” as subjects upon which to test his “theories.”
The tens of thousands of victims of forced sterilization and the ensuing lifetime of trauma and heartbreak were and are the victims of prejudice.
American “science” and Rockefeller’s millions, coupled with German psychiatry and Hitler’s madness, spawned the marriage in hell that became the Holocaust. America’s participation in sowing the seeds of the horror was, in fact, so fundamental that, at the post-war Nuremberg Trials, many of the defendants justified their actions by stating that their program of racial purity was, after all, similar to America’s.
Even the end of the Third Reich did not signal the end of forced sterilization in Germany—or in the United States—where the practice continued for decades.
The engine that drove eugenics was prejudice against minority communities. To be of African descent, or Indigenous or Asian or Hispanic, was to be labeled inevitably and incurably inferior, a poison to the blood of our nation. Not being a “true American” (Nordic/Anglo-Saxon, preferably blonde hair and blue eyes) stamped one as a threat, especially if one had children and their children had children. Non-whites, according to this “logic,” were intellectually, morally and culturally inferior, little better than “savages.” Racial hygiene was thus crucial to the continued survival of this great nation. But how to realize that goal was the question. Rather than spend white people’s hard-earned tax dollars expelling “undesirables” or sealing the borders or otherwise dealing with the “problem” they posed by their very existence, the twisted, heartless solution was to simply delete them. Stop them from reproducing themselves, and they’ll all just eventually die off.
The tens of thousands of victims of forced sterilization and the ensuing lifetime of trauma and heartbreak were and are the victims of prejudice. One would think that the surviving African, Native, Asian and Hispanic Americans should get an apology and recompense for what they have endured.
And in December 2015, the US Senate voted unanimously to help surviving victims of forced sterilization.
Here is the “help” the survivors got: Lip service—six years later—from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in the form of an “excuse us” for their role in cheerleading the racism and hatred of people of color that spurred the eugenics movement. And, as far as compensation, spare change from the governments of North Carolina ($35,000 to each survivor) and Virginia (just $35,000)—all unacceptable and insulting. Considering that the average settlement for medical malpractice is $250,000 and a typical jury award is $1 million, offering such paltry sums for a done-without-consent life-crippling procedure is like Jack the Ripper saying, “Sorry, won’t happen again. Here’s five bucks for murdering your mom. We cool?”
California forcibly sterilized over 20,000 women by the year 1964.
On October 25, the mental health industry watchdog Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) and its Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics called attention to the injustice, demanding a more meaningful apology and appropriate compensation from federal and state governments and the mental health profession for the wounds inflicted on the innocent by the physical and mental abuse of forced sterilization—wounds that still fester, not just for the individual survivors, but in the form of psychiatric and eugenics policies that still impact our country today.
And just what is being compensated? A small sampling:
One out of every four Native American women were sterilized against their will by the ironically named Indian Health Service (IHS) in the 1960s and 1970s. The IHS, founded in 1955, operated under the assumption that “native people and people of color were morally, mentally and socially defective,” according to historian Jane Lawrence.
Exact statistics of Blacks forcibly sterilized during the 20th century are hard to come by, but two will suffice. In North Carolina, from 1933 to 1979, about 5,000 received the procedure. In California, between 1909 and 1964, Blacks were four times more likely to be sterilized than whites.
In Puerto Rico, from the 1930s to the 1970s, nearly one-third of the female population was sterilized.
California forcibly sterilized over 20,000 women by the year 1964—most of them Mexican, Mexican-American and Chicana women.
According to CCHR, “The legacy of these practices continues to affect these communities, who are still subjected to stigmatizing and harmful mental health treatments today.”
“It’s all very sad, yes indeed,” the APA and its enablers in state and federal governments will say, “but it all happened SO long ago.”
No, it didn’t. Even after legislation protecting women from forced sterilization was passed, the atrocity continued. Between 1970 and 1976, from 25 to 50 percent of the Native American female population in the US was sterilized, and deep into the 1990s, inmates of color in California prisons received the same abusive operation.
The APA should acknowledge its crimes and pony up. We’re not talking about recalling a shipment of defective toasters here. We’re talking about the surviving remnant of tens of thousands of human beings ruined forever by hatred, greed and pseudoscience. CCHR’s calls should be heeded: Grant those who’ve suffered too much for too long some measure of closure.
