MECKLENBURG COUNTY, N.C. — North Carolina’s Speaker of the House is re-introducing a bill to give victims of the state’s controversial eugenics program $50,000 each. Thousands of people were sterilized under the program before it was shut down in the 1970s.
Rita Thompson Swords, now in her 70s, remembers being in the hospital as a young mother about to turn 21. Her second child had just been delivered.
“I'll never forget that,” Swords said. “I wanted to see my baby and they said the baby had been adopted out.”
Her father was also in the same hospital that day, after having a stroke, and he had signed away her rights to the child. He also approved a surgery that would take away her ability to have more children. Her sister says she’s a victim of the state’s eugenics program.
“He wasn't in his right mind,” Swords’ sister Margie Owens said. “They tricked him, and that's what they did -- had him sign them papers."
Owens said the state made her sister out to be an unfit mother because she was unwed and poor, but she had been working for years. She raised her first child and eventually got married. She couldn’t give her husband of more than 40 years any kids.
“That's what my husband would have loved to have,” Swords said.
According to the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, around 7,600 North Carolinians, both men and women, were sterilized often by force or coercion from 1929 until 1974. They were poor, disabled, or just weren’t the kind of parents that the North Carolina Eugenics Board deemed fit.
There’s a bill in the state legislature that would give victims of the sterilization program $50,000 each. The bill has been brought before lawmakers before, but Swords hopes this year will be different. She hopes the promise of money will become a reality.
“I'd be the happiest lady in town,” Swords said.
She said the money would go a long way. She'd be able to buy a new heater that could heat her entire mobile home in Matthews. She said the money would be a big help, but it will never give her back what was taken.