‘You Just Feel Like Nothing’: California to Pay Sterilization Victims
More than 20,000 people, many of them disabled, poor or people of color, were forced to undergo the procedure under the state’s decades-long eugenics program.
Leonard Bisel was 15 when the state of California decided that he should not have children, threatening to lock him up and force him to do hard labor if he did not submit to sterilization.
In the middle of his operation, recalled Mr. Bisel, now 88, he woke up. “It was really painful,” he said, “and the doctor told me to shut up.”
Under the influence of a movement known as eugenics, whose supporters believed that those with physical disabilities, psychiatric disorders and other conditions were “genetically defective,” more than 60,000 people across the United States were forcibly sterilized by state-run programs throughout the 20th century.
They included more than 20,000 people over seven decades in California, under a eugenics law enacted in 1909. Almost all of the state’s procedures were performed through institutions, like the one where Mr. Bisel lived, and none were legally required to have the patient’s consent. Some of those sterilized were as young as 11.
