Feb 06, 2001

Grim Legacy

Va. eugenics policy led to sterilization

BY BILL BASKERVILL

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LYNCHBURG His state labeled him a "mental defective" and surgically sterilized him.

His nation honored him as a war hero, awarding him the Bronze Star for valor, the Purple Heart and the Prisoner of War Medal for service in World War II.

Now the Virginia House of Delegates has refused to apologize to Raymond W. Hudlow and the thousands of other Virginians, mostly teen-agers and young adults, who were sterilized under the state's eugenics program. Instead, the House last week voted to express its "profound regret" for the General Assembly's action 77 years ago that led to forced sterilizations.

"Does this man [Hudlow] deserve an apology, or just regrets?" said Phil Theisen, president of the Lynchburg Depressive Disorders Association. Theisen is a leading advocate for a state apology.

Virginia officials, acting under a eugenics law that served as a model for the rest of the nation, tried to purify the white race from 1924 to 1979 by targeting virtually any human shortcoming they believed was a hereditary disease that could be stamped out by surgical sterilization. Such maladies

included mental illness, mental retardation, epilepsy, criminal behavior, alcoholism and immorality.

In 1941, Hudlow was a frightened 16-year-old who became caught up in Virginia's eugenics frenzy that led to the forced sterilization of about 7,500 people.

His crime: repeatedly running away from home to avoid beatings by his father.

"Every time my father beat me I ran away. He beat me half to death," Hudlow said in a recent interview at his mobile home near Lynchburg.

When his father told the "welfare lady" that "he couldn't control me," Hudlow's reproductive fate was sealed.

"I was picked up by the sheriff at home. He handcuffed me and took me" to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded near Lynchburg, where most of Virginia's sterilizations were performed.

On June 17, 1942, Amherst County Circuit Judge Edward Meeks granted the colony's request to sterilize Hudlow, identified in the court order as an "inmate" of the colony.

Hudlow, now 75, remembers the day the colony eugenicists came for him.

"They just came and got me before I woke up one morning. They wheeled me and throwed me up on the operating table. They put straps around my waist and chest, spread my legs and put my feet in stirrups.

"There was a nurse holding my arms above my head so I wouldn't move.

"When they grabbed my testicles, they pinched them up. They took a needle and stuck it into my testicles." Hudlow believes this was anesthesia.

"They didn't wait for it to work. They made an incision. They went right on in there. I was hollering and crying. I was hurting."

None of the colony medical staff explained what they were doing to him, Hudlow said. "The only way I found out, an employee on Ward 7 told me I wouldn't be able to father any children.

"They treated us just like hogs, like we had no feelings."

Hudlow was released from the colony in October 1943 and drafted into the Army two months later.

"I went in at Omaha Beach in France in August 1944," two months after the Allied invasion of Europe.

Hudlow served as the radioman for his platoon leader. He saw combat in France, Belgium and Holland, where he was wounded in the left knee and captured by the Germans. He was in various prison camps for seven months until he was liberated by the Russians in May 1945.

Hudlow decided to make the military a career, serving 21 years in the Army and Air Force.

Hudlow doesn't talk about his war service unless questioned about it and did not mention his medals until asked if he was awarded any. He keeps his medals, citations and military records in a footlocker in his bedroom closet.

He said he has had more flashbacks about the sterilization procedure than about the terror of combat and imprisonment by the Germans.

"I remember this just as it was yesterday. It has always been in my mind. It has never left me."

He said his inability to have children "worked on my mind, especially when I was around my sisters and my brother. They had children."

Hudlow said he might try to testify before a Senate committee when it takes up the eugenics resolution if he doesn't have to walk too far at the state Capitol. He said his feet have been hurting him a lot lately and he has a hard time getting around.

Eugenics eventually was discredited as political and social prejudice rather than scientific fact, but neither Virginia nor any of the 29 other states that conducted eugenical sterilizations has ever compensated, apologized or memorialized the more than 60,000 eugenics victims.

Virginia's eugenics law, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, 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 1927 Supreme Court ruling 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.

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