Julie Rose of NPR calls it a brutal chapter in North Carolina’s eugenics past, a period when the state sterilized 7,000 people, referred not only by doctors in prisons and mental hospitals, but also by social workers:
I found former social worker Merlene Wall in her Charlotte condo. She’s 80, and her memory is going — but she’s willing to talk.
“It was an interesting time. We stayed busy, we really did,” Wall says.
Mecklenburg County was booming then. The typical welfare recipient was a single woman with four or five kids. Politicians and public officials worried that these unwed mothers and their children would overwhelm the system.
The North Carolina Eugenics Board offered them a solution. Since the 1930s, it had sterilized people in mental hospitals and schools for troubled youth. In the ’50s, the focus shifted to women on welfare, and on social workers like Wall.
“I keep thinking back about one case, and there were retarded daughters and my gosh … what a time and what a mess,” she says. “And how do you, how do you protect the children that these two females had?”
I’m not sure that this qualifies as a brutal chapter:
Kuralt did not believe women should be sterilized against their will. He was a champion for reproductive rights who wanted to help women prevent pregnancy when they couldn’t afford the children they already had.
But this was the ’50s: Abortion was illegal, and the birth control pill wasn’t available. Existing methods for women were complicated or unreliable. Having your tubes tied, on the other hand, was very reliable.
Kuralt knew his welfare clients couldn’t afford to pay a doctor for sterilization, but if he referred them to the Eugenics Board, the government would pay.
Consider this case Kuralt initiated:
Married female, age 38. Two children. Currently pregnant. She wandered out into the woods to have her last child. They sleep on corn shucks and cotton piled in the corner. This couple came to the Welfare Department to request sterilization for the woman.