Paying the victims of state sterilization

This editorial board is pleased any time that the government admits its own abuses and seeks to compensate the people those policies directly harmed. We therefore applaud the successful effort by Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo, D-los Angeles, to create a $7.5-million program that compensates survivors of California’s forced sterilization program.

As the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund explained in its support statement, “Between 1909 and 1979, California law directed the administrators of state institutions to forcibly sterilize individuals who they deemed ‘unfit’ for reproduction.” California, it adds, administered the nation’s most aggressive program.

Carrillo’s original legislation was widely supported, but the state enacted the concept via budget language. By California standards, the expenditure is modest. We might pick nits with the $2-million administrative costs, but it’s only fair to help approximately 600 remaining victims of forced sterilization.

Nevertheless, the effort falls short on one marker. One of its goals is to bring attention to the human rights violations that the state of California had perpetrated on this group. For instance, the program earmarks $1 million for memorial sites — and supporters have discussed the discriminatory nature of these forced sterilizations, which affected Latinas at much higher rates than others.

The forced-sterilization program evolved from a then-popular eugenics movement that tried to “improve” the human race by limiting reproduction from mentally disabled people, poor people and minorities. That thinking obviously was a stain on American society, but it emanated from the progressive movement and its fixation on using government for uplift.

“Progressives rejected the founders’ natural-rights doctrine and conception of freedom,” wrote syndicated columnist George Will. “The progressive theologian Walter Rauschenbusch argued that with modern science, ‘we can intelligently mold and guide the evolution in which we take part,’” he added.

Obviously, progressives long-ago rejected eugenics, but if California is going to tell the truth about the forced-sterilization program, then it ought to tell the entire truth.