Jan 30, 2001

House panel approves apology for eugenics

Forced sterilizations conducted until 1979

BY BILL BASKERVILL

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A resolution calling for the General Assembly to apologize for Virginia's forced sterilization of 7,450 people under the phony science of eugenics was approved by a House of Delegates committee last night.

The House Rules Committee passed the measure 6-4 after rejecting a proposal to gut the resolution on a 5-5 vote. House Speaker S. Vance Wilkins Jr., R-Amherst and chairman of the committee, cast the final and decisive vote.

Retained was language "expressing the General Assembly's apology for Virginia's experience with eugenics." Virginia conducted forced sterilizations from 1915 to 1979, when the last eugenics language was removed from state law.

The resolution, sponsored by Del. Mitchell Van Yahres, D-Charlottesville, also calls for the legislature to "express its profound regret over the Commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement . . . and the incalculable human damage done in the name of eugenics."

Phil Theisen, president of the Lynchburg Depressive Disorders Association, urged the committee to approve the measure.

"This is a skeleton in the closet for Virginia that will continue to be there until it's addressed forthright," Theisen said. "An apology would be a historic first, and that makes it all the more important."

Neither Virginia nor any of the 29 other states that conducted eugenical sterilizations has ever compensated, apologized to or memorialized the more than 60,000 eugenics victims.

Virginia's Southern aristocracy, operating under a state law that served as a model for the rest of the nation, tried to purify the white race by targeting virtually any human shortcoming it believed was a hereditary disease that could be stamped out by surgical sterilization. Such maladies included mental illness, mental retardation, criminal behavior, alcoholism and immorality.

Eugenics eventually was discredited as political and social prejudice rather than scientific fact.

It is not known how many sterilization victims are still alive. About 10 live on one block in Lynchburg not far from the old Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where most Virginia sterilizations were carried out.

Experts on the eugenics movement say Virginia's law, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, had a dramatic impact in Germany, where Adolf Hitler's 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases contained language that echoed the Virginia statute.

The Nazis forcibly sterilized 2 million people and carried the racial purity policy further by murdering millions in the Holocaust.

At the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, the Virginia law was cited by attorneys for accused Nazis as the precedent for the Nazi race-cleansing programs.

The 1927 Supreme Court ruling on Virginia's eugenics law still stands as the constitutional standard on involuntary sterilization, prompting a federal judge in 1984 to throw out a class-action lawsuit filed by Virginia's eugenics victims.