Frank Weathers, with mucho documentation and linkage, lays it out:
They were wronged is an understatement. We were wronged, and they were treated like animals. The stark realization hit me as I pondered another thought: unwritten histories lie waiting to be discovered in archives all around the country, and all throughout the world. Things known to God and to man, but forgotten by the “march of progress,” and by generations uninterested in learning the secrets of the democracy of the dead.
… As it turns out, North Carolina had the third highest number of enforced sterilizations in the country. And this sad chapter started in 1907 in the state of Indiana. The state with the most documented cases? California, which started their program in 1909 and kept it cranking up until 1963. In the Golden State, the conservative estimate is that at least 20,108 people were sterilized though, “because of the sensitive nature of sterilization records, many are difficult to access or have been altered.”
…Am I alone in thinking that this historical information is relevant in light of the HHS Mandate and the push for “preventative services” that include sterilizations, birth-control pills, and abortions to all, regardless of whether some, such as the Catholic Church, and her allied hospitals and colleges, and Catholics in their own right, object to these practices?….How is this new level of coercion by the Federal government any less ham-handed than what is being described…. above?
A commenter, whose immigrant mother was pressured (at best) into being sterilized, writes, “As tears stream down my face, I know that I will have justice someday! They took my family away…”