The Administrative Forms for Sterilization

Well, the hearing on the bill to provide compensation to sterilization victims went well.  Several survivors and family members spoke, as well as several middle school students.   As I was driving back with a couple of law students we remarked those students and their teacher really had their act together!

The committee had a thoughtful debate about the bill.  The anti-reparations arguments rested largely on this isn't the responsibility of the current generation (and also to some extent, a lot of other states did this, so North Carolina shouldn't be singled out).  That was countered by the argument that are people still living who are suffering as a result of the state's action.  I wasn't surprised by any of the arguments; but I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

The house judiciary committee passed the bill, so it's on its way.  Looks like this is actually going to make it -- and will be just another episode of realistic reparations.

Along the lines of the "this was done by the state" argument, I thought you might find the forms that the state prepared to facilitate the petitions for sterilization of particular interest.   The forms were reprinted in a lot of places, including a 1938 pamphlet from the Eugenics Board that made the case for sterilization.  It never ceases to surprise me how technology is harnessed to effect the ends of the state.  And how much those forms were designed to stream-line the process.  And perhaps you'd find also of interest the appendix to Moya Woodside's 1950 study of sterilization in North Carolina, Sterilization in North Carolina: A Sociological and Psychological Study, which tells the story of "illustrative cases" of people who were sterilized in the 1940s.

The illustration is the Judiciary Committee hearing, where Representative Larry Womble, who's been the champion of this issue for about a decade now, moved the bill.  This was his first appearance in the legislature, I think, since he was in a car accident last fall.

Comments

[Jack]

Great series of posts. The forms are unbelievable--banality and all that.

[Daniel S. Goldberg]

The use of these forms is very important psychologically, socially, politically, and legally, I think. They cloak the actual bodies of the people whom are to be sterilized (or, in the case of the Third Reich, to be tortured, experimented upon, or murdered) in the clothing and machinery of the state. There is, if not an element of dehumanizing to the bureaucracy, at least an aspect in which the lived experiences of the person on whom the violation is to be performed are erased and made invisible. They are standardized and aggregated into the state itself, which fits with Lifton's notion of the 'biocracy,' which I've mentioned here I think is important for thinking about eugenics, etc.

Thanks for the wonderful coverage, as always, Al.