Our State's Eugenics Victims Deserve Better

It’s hard to blame Elnora Mills for not feeling terribly grateful. Decades after being forcibly sterilized under the state eugenics program, she and other victims of that cruel social experiment are finally seeing some compensation. Mills has been notified that she soon will receive the first half of a payout that is expected to total about $50,000.

Mills had a “nervous breakdown” as a teenager, spent some time in a psychiatric hospital and, as a result, was deemed unfit to bear children. Her reproductive organs were removed during an appendectomy, unbeknownst to her. She didn’t find out that she couldn’t have children until after she married.

Mills was one of an estimated 7,600 North Carolinians who were sterilized against their will between 1929 and 1974, when the forced eugenics program at last was brought to an end.

The legislature capped total payments at $10 million, to be split among victims who are alive and who can prove they were part of the sterilization program that continued in North Carolina for years after other states had abandoned the practice.

Advocates for...